by Katie Zavadski
About a decade ago, members of the Raëlian religion began raising funds for a so-called Pleasure Hospital in Burkina Faso, which would restore the clitorises of women who had undergone female genital mutilation. The hospital had been slated to open in early March, but it was blocked by the local government. Sue Lloyd-Roberts reports that the American surgeons, led by gender-confirmation surgery expert Marci Bowers, moved their operating room to a local doctor’s clinic:
Bebe, a 24-year-old, is among the first. Is she scared? “No, I am not scared,” she says. “I am just angry. They cut me when I was four and it still hurts. Whenever my husband approaches, I just don’t want him.”
Bebe is given a local anaesthetic for the procedure which is a surprisingly simple one. Bowers investigates to see how badly Bebe has been mutilated. “No matter how severe it is,” Bowers explains, “we can always find the clitoris.” Although the visible part of the clitoris is cut off during FGM, it remains below the surface. “Voilà,” Bowers says as she finds it and pulls it up. “The clitoris now looks amazingly normal, part of an unaltered female anatomy.”
By the end of the first day, the team have “restored” eight women. The word is getting out, beyond the borders of Burkina Faso. By day three, women from Senegal, Mali and even Kenya come to the clinic to ask for the operation.
But the government swiftly canceled the licenses of the foreign doctors:
An official at the Health Ministry tells me that the opening was cancelled because Clitoraid [the organization behind the Pleasure Hospital] had not provided essential documents. All of which sounds reasonable until the Health Minister tells another journalist that “medical organisations should be focused on saving lives and not advertising their religion in an attempt to convert vulnerable people.”
Wendy Syfret talks to Clitoraid spokeswoman Nadine Gary:
How central is orgasm to Raëlian philosophy?
Pleasure is the most important part of the Raëlian philosophy, but the central part is simply explaining that life on planet Earth was created scientifically by people like us. Ladies like us and men who were created in their image. When you enjoy your clitoris, you can think that women creators have a clitoris just like you and have created you in their image, so you can enjoy yourself like they enjoy themselves. So is orgasm central to the Raëlian philosophy? Yes. You know we don’t masturbate every second of the day, but we don’t shy from it.
Previous Dish coverage of FGM here.
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