Tatu Kamau, a Kenyan female doctor wants female genital mutilation to be decriminalized. She is asking Kenya’s courts to allow women above 18 the right to practice female genital mutilation, saying that they have a right to choose what they want to do with their bodies as adults.
She also wants the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act 2011 to be annulled and the law, disbanded. In a 2017 petition which she filed against the government, she adds that female genital mutilation is an age old tradition in Kenya and that an outright ban infringes on women’s rights to exercise their cultural beliefs.
Women who took their daughters for circumcision were not taking them there to destroy them. Those children were not thrown away afterward, they were celebrated as respected members of the society. To use the word in our context suggests that it is malicious and that we are intentionally damaging our females. To me, it is very wrong.
We could have had limitations of where you can do it, when, who can do it for you and how …Those things could have been controlled … such that you have certain months of the year and that is the only time you can do and it can only be done by certain professionals, those are the only people who are allowed to do it.
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