From the RawStory (!!) article:
Dr. Renée Bergstrom broke the silence about her experience with female genital mutilation as a child. She recounted how when she was just three years old she was taken to the doctor to have her clitoris removed, Bergstrom wrote for the Guardian.
Bergstrom is now 72 years old, but is now breaking the silence about female genital mutilation, which happened in white, Midwest America. She wrote of her Christian mother taking her to a church clinic to have the procedure as a “‘cure’ for masturbation.â€
“My mother was concerned that I was masturbating, and my face turned very red,†Bergstrom shared in a video that accompanied her piece. “She took me to a doctor who said, ‘Well I can fix that,’ and cut off my clitoris.â€
“As I was growing older, she told me she knew it was a mistake and that I was not supposed to ever talk about it,†she said.
“I remember the excruciating pain and feeling betrayed,†she wrote.
I don't believe this story for several reasons:
* The supposed surgery was done in a "church
clinic". Significant surgery like that, in those days, would have been done in a hospital. Even today it would be done in a surgery center, not a clinic.
* The supposed surgery was done in a "
church clinic". Say what? There was a medical clinic on a church's property? Nonsense! At most - stipulating what I think highly dubious - it was at a hospital facility with "Baptist" or "Presbyterian" or "Methodist" in its name. Doctors, nurses, and other staff at such hospitals may never have darkened the threshold of a church entrance with their shadows, but this female is obviously trying a guilt-by-association smear, with deflecting from the mass-scale genital mutilation in the Muslim world.
* The supposed surgery was done without anesthesia or pain medication afterward. Not. Credible.
* As DU-member "Hortensis", no Christian sect is identified - that is true of both the RawStory article and the Guardian article on which RS's article was based. Further, neither article mentioned whether the actual doctor was the least bit religious, a facility name, the city/town, or even a state. It's almost as if the story were crafted to preclude fact-checking.
* The implicit assumption that all FGM is the same when this doctor knows better, if she really works with women who have suffered FGM. What the doctor claims was done to her is vastly different from what was done, for example, to Ayaan Hirsi Ali (she described it, without TMI details, in her book,
Infidel). Her misleading of her readers goes well beyond over-simplification; it's deception.
All those DU-folk who failed to notice that this
supposedly happened 7 decades ago are likely to be a very entertaining source of outlandish
Christians do FGM claims, possibly for years to come.
