In addition to the Republican war on women’s right to choose that is escalating in several red states, President Donald Trump is now refusing to defend the federal ban on female genital mutilation, putting hundreds of thousands of American girls at risk.
The law has been on the books for the last 20 years, and for good reason.
According to the Centers for Disease Control:
Female genital cutting refers to all procedures involving partial or total removal of female genitalia or other injury to female genital organs for any cultural, religious or otherwise nontherapeutic reasons.
…
The practice poses adverse medical consequences, including direct complications from the procedure (anesthesia or sedation complications, bleeding, acute infection), increased risk of death for both mother and infant in subsequent pregnancies, post-traumatic stress disorder, and urinary tract infections, among others. In addition, there may be adverse consequences for the woman’s sexual well-being.
It’s a barbaric practice that has no place in the United States. But after a federal judge in Michigan ruled the law unconstitutional because it lacked unnecessary interstate language, the law is in jeopardy. Of course, the Trump administration could appeal the ruling to higher courts, but that would require that Solicitor General Noel Francisco have a spine.
Instead, he sent a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) informing her that he won’t defend the law and passed the buck to Congress like a hot potato he doesn’t want to touch.
The Trump administration is refusing to defend the national ban on torturing young girls in the most awful and breathtakingly indefensible way imaginable, depriving innocent victims from enjoying relatively normal lives, depriving them of sexual pleasure, and depriving them of the ability to become pregnant, while sentencing them to lives of pain, despair and psychological torment.
And we all know Republicans have zero compassion for women these days. Not only have they refused to restore the Violence Against Women Act, they’ve been passing anti-abortion legislation that would charge women with murder for having an abortion without exceptions for rape and incest.
While rapists are not subject to the death penalty, women prosecuted under these new laws would be.
Thus, Republicans are not just in favor of men raping and committing violence against women and forcing them to give birth against their will, they are in favor of female genital mutilation.
This is a full-scale war on women by a ruthless Republican Party driven by extreme religious beliefs that should be rejected in our society. And the only way to end this war once and for all is for women to flock to the polls every single November and vote until Republicans have no more political power anywhere.
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