I was reading this blogpost, becoming ever more shocked and appalled, but thinking that I had no reason to post about it here, until I got to the last line:

“If you’re reading this and you’re a student at Cornell: female genital mutilation is being practiced on your campus. What are you going to do about it?”

It’s an excellent question.

Pediatric urologist Dix Poppas of Cornell is a leading practitioner of infant “clitoroplasty,” the surgical reduction of the clitoris. In the surgery, performed on babies with larger than average clitorises, the clitoral shaft is excised and the head is re-attached. This surgery is purely aesthetic, and highly controversial. But what’s even more startling is Poppas’ post-surgical follow-up — at regular annual checkups, Poppas uses a vibrator to stimulate the girls’ genitals.

Two academic ethicists who have investigated Poppas’ practice report that “nearly all clinicians to whom we described Poppas’s ‘clitoral sensory testing and vibratory sensory testing’ practices thought them so outrageous that they told us we must have the facts wrong. When we showed them the 2007 article, their disbelief ceased, but they then seemed to become as agitated as we were.”