Kay,
The ridiculous high moral stance that Americans like to take on this awful subject disavows the FACT that in this country, some fifteen states still do NOT have laws against it. And:
In addition to its prevalence in immigrant communities in the US, FGM was considered a standard medical procedure in America for most of the 19th and 20th centuries.[6] Physicians performed surgeries of varying invasiveness to treat a number of diagnoses, including hysteria, depression, nymphomania, and frigidity. The medicalization of FGM in the United States allowed these practices to continue until the end of the 20th century, with some procedures covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield Insurance until 1977.[7][6] — Wikipedia
America has no ground to stand upon here.
This is violence against women, there is no other way to describe it. It is hardly limited to developing countries. What is particularly sad is that women themselves are perpetrators, because of ignorance, and so the practice continues.
As the paragraph above shows medical practitioners are also offenders right up until barely forty years ago. The medical community, removing our sex organs to treat conditions that probably had a great deal more to do with emotional distress caused by abuse: hysteria, depression, nymphomania, and frigidity.
Again: we have no moral ground. Ignorance, woman-hatred, patriarchal standards and the wholesale belief that a woman’s body- especially her sex organs- do no belong to her all serve to perpetuate this horror.
This is just one of the myriad issues that are under the heading of feminism and simple human rights.