Kathleen Mary Sheridan  

Hope For Victims of FGM

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Hope For Victims of FGM - Kathleen Mary Sheridan
Current mood: touched

For those who have been subjected to the atrocious practice of Female Genital Mutilation, there is hope. Dr. Pierre Foldès, French urologist and humanitarian, is the only surgeon to have developed a surgical technique which restores the clitoris. 

For the last 15 years, he has been "repairing" women who underwent female genital mutilations (FGM). Over the years, he has developed an original and groundbreaking technique for building a new clitoris, easing the pain and the medical complications that are inherent to the horrible practice, and giving women a newfound healthy sexuality.

Trained as a urological surgeon, Dr. Foldès chose to travel the world with Medecins du Monde and Doctors without Borders in Asia and Africa, where he had his first encounter with women who had undergone FGM. Using a technique based on the penis enlargement method, he found a way to rebuild the clitoris and performed a successful first surgery in Burkina Faso.

Dr Foldès - who has become a saviour to thousands of women - operates on genitally mutilated women at the Louis XIV hospital in Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside Paris. In a typical month, Dr. Foldès performs 80 to 100 surgeries. In his Paris office, an ever-growing number of women are coming from all over the world to seek his help. After a 3-year struggle with the French administration, Dr. Foldes finally obtained the surgery to be covered by the national medical coverage. Dr. Foldès is also teaching his technique twice a month to fellow surgeons who come from around the world and is currently working with other specialists to give women a global answer to the myriad of obstetrical problems stemming from the sexual mutilations they suffered.

Dr. Foldès, father of five children and married to a fellow doctor, Beatrice, performs the operations in addition to his full-time hospital work. He refuses to charge for the surgery because he considers his patients to be victims of one of the biggest crimes against humanity. "Victims shouldn't pay for the crimes against them. These women have already paid a huge price," he says. "It is like a violent rape which has involved family members."

He explains the reasons for his determination to continue with his work: "Excision is worse than rape because the family are involved. And it is much worse in terms of the clinical aftermath," he says.

Dr. Foldès was working as a humanitarian doctor in Burkina Faso in West Africa, 25 years ago, when he first encountered the traumatic effects of excision. "Some women came to me complaining of scarring which was very painful to them every time they moved," he recalls. "A special type of scar tissue called a keloid can develop on black skin, and in these cases it grows hard and thick and attaches itself to the pubic bone. The women asked me if I could do something about it. While I was operating, I began to do some reconstruction surgery on the vagina and labia as well as clearing scar tissue." The surgery, he says, was carried out in secret because of death threats from community members supporting the practice.

"The African women whose scar tissue I operated on in France were asking me if I could do more to help them. They wanted to feel like 'proper' women," he says. When Dr. Foldès continued his surgery on African women back in France, the death threats continued. "The police take them very seriously but I don't," he says, and points to a photograph in his office of a bullet hole in a wall in Cambodia. "If I can survive that and keep on working, why should I be scared of threatening phone calls and letters?"

Dr. Foldès' crusade to restore the clitoris to women who have been mutilated began 15 years ago. He began to research the subject but was shocked to find that the only organ in the human body devoted solely to pleasure had been metaphorically excised by the male-dominated medical fraternity. "It was invisible," he says indignantly. "It was shocking for me to discover in my research that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, on this organ, although there are hundreds of books on the penis, and several surgical techniques to lengthen it, enlarge it or repair it. Nobody was studying the clitoris because it is associated with female pleasure. There was very little anatomical detail on it. Let's say I had to start from scratch."

Dr. Foldès has now refined his technique to a whole new level. Excision is an ablation of the external part of the clitoris, which is a four-inch long organ. During surgery, Dr. Foldès opens the excision scar, removes all scar tissueand snips the supporting ligaments. He then pulls up a new external part of the clitoris. The ligaments are then repaired and he innervates the new clitoris. Tissue is then removed from the thighs to create the labia.The surgery takes less than an hour and requires spending only a day at the hospital, which allows women to have surgery discreetly. Post surgery pain lasts one to two weeks, and four to six months later, women claim to have a new healthy sexuality and to feel again their clitoris. This last point should be tempered by the fact that these women never had the opportunity to feel a "working" clitoris, and therefore have no way to compare.

Dr. Foldès agrees that the results of his surgical techniques have yet to be fully researched. "Women tell me they have sexual feelings they didn't have before, but if you've been excised at birth how can you know what an orgasm feels like? It does need to be researched scientifically and moves are afoot for that."

Kathleen Mary Sheridan