Posted on 05/06/2007 6:27:51 PM PDT by Pokey78
A debate is raging among doctors over Muslim women who demand operations to reconstitute their hymens before marriage and medical certificates stating that they are virgins.
The controversy has flared in France, where gynaecologists say that they are facing a growing number of requests from women desperate to avoid the repudiation that can follow the loss of chastity.
The phenomenon, which is also dividing doctors in other European countries, America and Africa, is denounced by critics as a sign of social regression driven by Islamic fundamentalists.
Jacques Lansac, Chairman of the French National College of Gynaecologists and Obstetricians, is leading the campaign against what he describes as an attack on the dignity of women. He has also issued advice against hymenoplasty a surgical operation that involves reconstructing the membrane usually broken during the first act of sexual intercourse.
Professor Lansac told The Times: We get more and more women coming in and saying that their brothers or fathers will kill them if they find out theyve slept with a man. But its important to say no, because if we dont were giving in to the fundamentalists.
However, he said that some doctors were ignoring his advice in the hope of protecting patients from ostracisation or violent beatings.
Isabelle Lévy, an author who studied the issue for her book Religion in the Hospital, said that the search for chastity certificates and hymenoplasties stemmed from conflicting pressures among the five million French Muslims.
On the one hand, young Muslim girls born in France go out a lot more than they used to. They are modern and they have adventures like other Europeans which never happened in the past.
But on the other hand, fundamentalism is spreading and these girls are getting sent back to their countries of origin to marry. And they will be rejected if it is found out that they are not virgins. The plight was evident from the account of one woman of North African origin on a French internet chat forum.
She slept with her boyfriend because he said that he was mad about me and wanted to marry me and I believed him because I was madly in love with him.
But he left her when she fell pregnant. The woman had an abortion, which she kept secret from her family until her mother discovered a letter from the clinic.
She fainted and afterwards it was total despair tears, insults, blows, disappointment and finally a dressing down.
She has asked her gynaecologist to redo my hymen because she says that if not it will ruin my future.
Several private French clinics carry out hymenoplasties.
But some doctors agree to undertake the operation in public hospitals, where it is funded by the welfare state, a practice that is not in theory authorised by officials.
Dr Stéphane Saint-Léger, head of gynaecology at Aulnay-sous-Bois hospital, outside Paris, refuses virginity certificates because its not a medical problem whether youre a virgin or not.
But other doctors are prepared to deliver them. Jacques Milliez, head of the department of gynaecology and obstetrics at Saint-Antoine hospital, Paris, told Le Monde: I worked in Algeria as a junior doctor and when I was on call at night I saw these young women whose throats had been slit because they were suspected of having lost their virginity. So if someone asks me, I sign the certificate.
I cannot imagine any Arab that would be or could be man enough to actually choose Rosie ODonnel as his wife.
...And brain transplants for all the hymen-obsessed men of a certain religious/ethnic constituency...
?
I’m against doing the procedure. On one hand, it is a total lie. It also has the nifty side benefit of slowing the Muslim breeding machine.
...the repudiation that can follow the loss of chastity.
That’s a fancy way to say “Death by stoning.”
Islam is regression...to the jungle.
CELEBRATE DIVERSITY!
These people represent the sector of the grand human race experiment that went bad. Very bad.
Disturbing to read — as usual when it comes to a lot of things Islamic.
Wonder, can not the young women refuse to be sent away to marry in another country? I know they would lose their families, but better than losing their heads.
I think I’d disown my family first saving them the trouble, and then disown Islam which wants my head on a platter.
If it worked for Geraldo, anything is possible!
The doctors who do these procedures and sign the certificates are quite possibly saving a woman’s life. It may be deceptive, but so was hiding Jews in Hitler’s Germany. I think the man upstairs would sanction it.
And after someone marries her, she'll think up excuses to cheat.
So you approve of the doctor helping her deceive a future husband?
Yep.
> Wonder, can not the young women refuse to be sent away to marry in another country? I know they would lose their families, but better than losing their heads. I think Id disown my family first saving them the trouble, and then disown Islam which wants my head on a platter.
It is very, very difficult, when you're part of a culture that is so fundamentalist and authoritarian, to have to make that decision to forsake family and home. Even harder to give up your religion. And all for the sake of having gotten laid -- and quite possibly not even of your own volition (e.g. if your boyfriend or a stranger raped you).
I do not envy the Islamic woman, on any point or at any level. It is a losing proposition from start to finish.
The same has been said in defense of teenage abortions without the knowledge of the pregnant teen's parents.
The doctors are basically being asked to participate in cases of fraud. But then again, the entire I-slam religion is a collosal case of fraud.....
Um, if the future husband was likely to kill her (assuming her own relatives didn’t first), yes, I would be in favour of it. A lie is a little better than murder.
If a woman has ever been pregnant there are other physical changes which could tip the husband off that his wife isn’t so pure.
Nope. No way.
Muslim women are so very much inconsiderate.....
Shame on the burka wearer's..........
Don't you realize that you're man's (or future husband, aka, suicide bomber) dream is to kill himself and go to another level - to go get him a heeping helping of SEVENTY-TWO virgins!!!!
You don't stand a chance with the "reconstituted" virgin wanna be thing, you little minx.
So sorry.
You're religion really sucks, eh?
giggle.......
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