FGM kills 44000 girls a year

[ArabellaScott]

https://www.bmj.com/content/390/bmj.r1758

' FGM kills 44 000 girls each year according to recent research, which analysed 15 African countries.1 This means that FGM is a bigger cause of death than malnutrition, measles, meningitis, HIV/Aids, and many other health threats for girls in the 15 countries studied.1 Yet, no major foundation prioritises funding to end FGM'
...
'We know that over three quarters of the FGM that is happening in Egypt or Sudan is carried out by medical professionals and the medicalisation trend is getting worse.4
This “medicalisation” of FGM is a dangerous trend because it can give the false impression that this violence can somehow be performed in a “safer” way.56 Medicalising FGM does not reduce the harm, it legitimises it. FGM is an act of torture that cannot be made safe no matter who performs it or in what setting it is performed.

That's an absolutely shocking number. I had trouble accessing the paper behind it referenced but this might work - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-38276-6

My god, that's horrifying. I find it hard to comprehend how so many girls can be killed in such a gruesome way and it barely makes the news

That’s insane… I had no idea it was so many!

Horrific. Those poor girls.

This seems to be the paper cited?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10432559/

'These estimates imply that FGM is a leading cause of the death of girls and young women in those countries where it is practised accounting for more deaths than any cause other than Enteric Infections, Respiratory Infections, or Malaria.'

That's insane, truly shocking.

The comparison with other causes is truly shocking. How little the world values girls.

How chilling and sad 😢

I know, it really is astonishing. I'd have thought the other causes listed would far outnumber deaths from FGM.

That is utterly horrific.

Yet the trans activists targeted and bullied a prominent anti FGM campaigner on X and reportedly nixed an anti-FGM law in the US because it would interfere with them removing the genitals of children and young people in the name of trans. Evil.

Bloody hell. We all knew it was horrific, completely unjustifiable mutilation, but didn’t realise the scale of deaths due to it.

Just so fucking evil to see girls' bodies as something inheritently flawed and needing to be corrected.

Do they die during the mutilation or later during normal life activities (sex/giving birth)?

Nimco Ali (author of the BMJ article) has had her fair share of abuse, I believe.

'Last week after tweeting “thank you JK Rowling”, I was attacked on Twitter by former equalities minister Lynne Featherstone and countless others who called me transphobic for merely thanking someone who put her head above the parapet to stand up for women.

As a feminist and activist I can’t tell you how scary it is to know that you will be attacked for sticking up for women. For saying that providing single-sex, trauma-informed safe spaces is crucial to recovery from abuse and violence suffered by women and their children.

I am worried about the moves to disregard the sex-specific nature of domestic and other forms of abuse like FGM.
That is why I am speaking up. There is nothing progressive about erasing biological sex in a system that has always oppressed women and girls.'

https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/i-stand-jk-rowling-trans-women-space-single-sex-spaces-terf-b989709.html

This is her anti FGM organisation:

https://thefivefoundation.org/nimco-ali-obe/

The paper I linked upthread has extensive explanations of the methodology used. They used comparators based on age, depending on average age of FGM in each country concerned. So, this is mortality directly after the mutilation, I would assume.

'FGM is illegal in most countries where it is practised and partly because of this it typically takes place in a non-sanitary environment and is not performed by clinicians. The available evidence shows that it often leads to severe pain, bleeding, and infection9, and sometimes death2,10,11. Given that it is performed on so many girls and women the aggregate health impacts of these complications are likely to be large. The WHO estimate the aggregate cost of medical treatment for girls and women after FGM was $1.4 billion in 201812. But, there is no systematic evidence about the role of FGM in the global epidemiology of child mortality. This in part reflects measurement difficulties. Measurement is difficult because FGM is illegal in most countries, because it may not always be identified as the underlying cause, and because the countries in which it is common are low income and have limited state capacity. Our analysis is designed to circumvent these difficulties and provide evidence as to the scale of excess mortality due to FGM. Our main aim is to estimate the effect of FGM on overall mortality rates and to use these estimates to calculate total annual excess mortality due to FGM.

Our approach is simple and is similar in spirit to the approaches used in forensic economics13,14. The key idea is that to the extent that FGM leads to death, this should be captured by increases in age-specific mortality rates. To compute these increases, we constructed a dataset combining information on the proportion of girls of a given age subject to FGM in each country with age-gender-year specific mortality rates. We used regression analysis to separate the effects of FGM from other country and year specific sources of mortality. We find that other things being equal, a country in which 50% more girls of a given age were mutilated would be associated with a 0.075 percentage point (95% CI 0·065−0·085) increase in their age-group-specific mortality rate, equivalent to an additional 44,320 girls dying a year.'

The paper I linked upthread has extensive explanations of the methodology used. They used comparators based on age, depending on average age of FGM in each country concerned. So, this is mortality directly after the mutilation, I would assume.

'FGM is illegal in most countries where it is practised and partly because of this it typically takes place in a non-sanitary environment and is not performed by clinicians. The available evidence shows that it often leads to severe pain, bleeding, and infection9, and sometimes death2,10,11. Given that it is performed on so many girls and women the aggregate health impacts of these complications are likely to be large. The WHO estimate the aggregate cost of medical treatment for girls and women after FGM was $1.4 billion in 201812. But, there is no systematic evidence about the role of FGM in the global epidemiology of child mortality. This in part reflects measurement difficulties. Measurement is difficult because FGM is illegal in most countries, because it may not always be identified as the underlying cause, and because the countries in which it is common are low income and have limited state capacity. Our analysis is designed to circumvent these difficulties and provide evidence as to the scale of excess mortality due to FGM. Our main aim is to estimate the effect of FGM on overall mortality rates and to use these estimates to calculate total annual excess mortality due to FGM.

Our approach is simple and is similar in spirit to the approaches used in forensic economics13,14. The key idea is that to the extent that FGM leads to death, this should be captured by increases in age-specific mortality rates. To compute these increases, we constructed a dataset combining information on the proportion of girls of a given age subject to FGM in each country with age-gender-year specific mortality rates. We used regression analysis to separate the effects of FGM from other country and year specific sources of mortality. We find that other things being equal, a country in which 50% more girls of a given age were mutilated would be associated with a 0.075 percentage point (95% CI 0·065−0·085) increase in their age-group-specific mortality rate, equivalent to an additional 44,320 girls dying a year.'

So those are the figures relating to child mortality, presumably as a result of the complications after the procedure.
But what about the impact later - issues with sex, childbirth and the pelvic floor. Where are they quantified?
Ita a hideous practice.

'It is important to understand the scale of previous research which has highlighted the many consequences of FGM for girls throughout their lives, something our analysis does not consider. One aspect of this literature is the direct consequences of FGM for women’s sexual pleasure and relationships'

Cited studies:

15.Catania L, Abdulcadir O, Puppo V, Verde JB, Abdulcadir J, Abdulcadir D. Pleasure and orgasm in women with female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) J. Sex. Med. 2007;4(6):1666–1678. doi: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2007.00620.x. DOI] PubMed] Google Scholar]
16.Alsibiani SA, Rouzi AA. Sexual function in women with female genital mutilation. Fertil. Steril. 2010;93(3):722–724. doi: 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2008.10.035. DOI] PubMed] Google Scholar]
17.Fahmy A, El-Mouelhy MT, Ragab AR. Female genital mutilation/cutting and issues of sexuality in Egypt. Reprod. Health Matt. 2010;18(36):181–190. doi: 10.1016/S0968-8080(10)36535-9. DOI] PubMed] Google Scholar]

I remember watching a documentary on this a while back and it was mothers and grandmothers doing this to their own daughters and granddaughters. I cant get my head around it.

That's a lot higher than I would have thought! Those poor little girls.

And there's this:

'we conducted a systematic review of the scientific literature and quantitative meta-analyses of the obstetric consequences of FGM/C. We included 44 primary studies, of which 28 were comparative, involving almost 3 million participants. The methodological study quality was generally low, but several studies reported the same outcome and were sufficiently similar to warrant pooling of effect sizes in meta-analyses. The meta-analyses results showed that prolonged labor, obstetric lacerations, instrumental delivery, obstetric hemorrhage, and difficult delivery are markedly associated with FGM/C, indicating that FGM/C is a factor in their occurrence and significantly increases the risk of delivery complications'

'The results showed that women with FGM/C were 3.3 times more likely to experience difficult labor and twice as likely to experience obstetric hemorrhage compared to women without FGM/C'
...

'Moreover, we did not assess outcomes related to the child, but several studies have documented an increased risk of fetal distress in women with FGM/C'

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3710629/

I saw one too, the idea was that they were protecting them from rape and that no man would marry these girls if they (the mothers) didn't mutilate them, so the girls would starve.

Such absolute evil forced on women and girls by men.

That wasnt in the one I watched. The women were practically laughing and thinking their daughters were being silly for crying and being in pain. This was in very rural areas in huts rather than what the OP is describing as happening now.