Earlier this year, a 7-year-old girl from Minnesota entered an examination room at a clinic just outside of Detroit. Thinking this was a regular visit, she allowed the doctor to remove her pants and underwear and place her on the examination table. Suddenly, while two women in the clinic held her hands, the physician spread her legs and cut her clitoris. Two months later she told investigators the pain ran down to her ankles and she could barely walk.
In April Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, who allegedly performed the procedure, was charged with conspiracy to commit female genital mutilation. Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, the owner of the since-closed clinic, was also charged. Investigators suspect Ms. Nagarwala may be involved in 100 other cases, and the trial starts in October. This marks the first time a female genital mutilation case is going to federal court. The lawyers for the Michigan physician will argue the girl “underwent a benign religious procedure.” This is a dangerous hypocrisy with far-reaching consequences.
Female genital mutilation has been illegal in the U.S. since 1996. Yet a 2012 study in the journal Public Health Reports estimates that more than 500,000 girls in the U.S. have undergone the procedure or are at risk. These girls live all over the country, with larger concentrations in California, New York and Minnesota. Most go through this process in secret, and only 25 states have laws that criminalize the procedure. In Maine, the American Civil Liberties Union has opposed a bill to do so on the ground that “the risk of mutilation isn’t worth expanding Maine’s criminal code.”
“The risk of mutilation isn’t worth expanding Maine’s criminal code?” Worth it to whom? Free exercise of religion includes declining to participate in activities prohibited by the religion (eating certain foods, dancing, drinking alcohol, or performing abortions, for instance) and declining to lend support via personal contributions of labor or money to prohibited activities. Here in the US we have laws, however, against acts which cause direct harm to others. We don’t permit wife-beating. We don’t permit honor killings or dowry murders. We shouldn’t permit the mutilation of little girls, mutilation which is not only painful at the time but causes them to be, for life, unable to experience sexual pleasure — not as a side effect, which would be bad enough, but as the intended effect of the procedure.
The ACLU is rapidly losing its way.