John – I’m glad Unicef is on the case. Stopping the sanctioned genital mutilation of females across much of Africa and the Islamic world, though controversial, would really be a seriously worthy cause. I am a little dubious that Unicef, or any U.N. body, will touch this issue. Indeed, I’d bet the practice is spreading as we blog.

The percentage of circumcised women in Egypt was in the high 90s according to this NY Times story of last year. Striking is the fact that neither parental education nor class spares anyone, and that, for the most part, the mutilation is now performed in hospitals by trained doctors, instead of in village huts by shamans and older women. This suggests that this “tradition” has successfully made the transition from pre-modern culture to modern practice. While it is a good thing that rates of infection and death from the procedure are lower, it still serves the same purpose of denying women any sexual pleasure and probably causing significant pain in the majority of instances. (That is the intention, of course. It helps in the fight to maintain “purity.”) And, the unhappy correlate of “safer” mutilation is decreased motivation to stop the practice altogether, when the harms aren’t quite as glaring as death or barrenness from infection.

With the exception of a few groups of women lawyers, nobody in Egypt, including the government which banned it, cares if it stops. A government that wished to really end this practice could easily control much of what occurs at the hands of licensed physicians. It is a fight they don’t want to pick with the unemployed, the poorly educated, the badly fed peasants, the Islamists who control the mosques and public squares, or the increasingly religious sections of society. Because they have no legitimacy, autocratic governments have problems instituting enlightened practices that come up against traditional culture.

Just as immigrants from these Islamic countries are slowing importing polygamy, and we here in the first world are doing nothing about it, I promise that some are not allowing their daughters to forgo genital mutilation — lest they become unmarriageable. As long as no one files an insurance claim it can all be done away from prying eyes. And then the more doctrinaire libertarians and the parental-rights-when-it-comes-to-religion absolutists will defend it. Indeed, those FLDS lawyers, should they so desire, will have a whole new clientele.