Symbolic Female Circumcision?

For many activists, the elimination of Female Genital Mutilation, sometimes simply called Female Circumcision, is a high priority. It is justifiably regarded as a barbaric mutilation of female infants in the name of male control of women's sexuality and women's bodies. But what if something similar could be done as a replacement - something that doesn't mutilate girls any more than male circumcision mutilates boys - but which would also meet people's religious and cultural requirements?

Frank Bruni reports for The New York Times:

How far can, and should, Europeans bend to accommodate so many new immigrants with such a wide variety of cultural traditions? ... "Whether they live in Italy or Britain of France or America, they don't want to let go of their traditions," [Dr. Omar Abdulcadir] said as he sat in his office on Monday afternoon. "So I'm trying to give them a way to save that tradition." That alternative, as he described it, would be a piercing of the tip of the clitoris that would draw just a drop or two of blood and would be largely symbolic. He said he would use a topical anesthetic. But whether immigrant women would actually use the procedure, which would probably not violate any law, remains unclear.

This does raise an interesting debate. The harm to any individual infant is probably negligible or non-existent - and so far, no one seems to be objecting by saying that it would harm the girls. Instead, objectors say either that no one will do it (those who care would deem the procedure insufficient, those who don't care simply won't bother) or that the symbolic procedure validates the general mutilation of girls overall.

I can sympathize with this latter argument - what if someone proposed a symbolic segregation of blacks in the 1960s in order to make whites feel more comfortable with giving up the tradition of real segregation? Today, such a proposal sounds outrageous, but much of that is due to the fact that we today consider racial segregation outrageous, symbolic or real. Is that perception, though, partly due to the attempts to completely eliminate it? Would we still feel that segregation were awful if many of us grew up under either real or symbolic segregation? Perhaps - and that's why a symbolic evil isn't always a great step away from a real evil.

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• Bioethics