>> Apparently it was time, the United meanwhile very serious news. We're gonna get serious here
has banned virginity testing and hymen repair surgery. So there's an amendment
that has been added to the health and care bill on Monday. That will make it
illegal to perform any procedure that aims to reconstruct the hymen with or without consent.
Dozens of clinics there in the UK. Private hospitals as well as pharmacies have offered
the controversial surgery with the promise of quote restoring virginity with with growing
numbers of girls and young women coerced into undergoing the procedure. Scar tissue is used
to construct a fake hymen with the aim of making a girl or woman bleed when she next has intercourse.
And so that now will be formally banned. That does not mean that the procedure will still not happen
in some cases, cuz families as we'll get into are going to be pushing for that in some cases. But
anyway Viviana, what do you think about this in the UK?
>> I'm glad that they are banning it. But I am a rare person in the US who also is not
a fan of circumcision. So this is one of those things where I feel we need to live leave little
kids bodies alone. This whole first of all, not every woman bleeds the first time they have sex.
That's so ridiculous. It's a misnomer makes no sense. And there are some societies and
cultures that perform female circumcision for this very purpose as well to make the opening of
the vagina smaller. So that it rips during intercourse or that. And
in some cultures the man will rip it open with a sharp nail that he grows before consummation.
This has a lot of really deep weird stuff that's going on with this. It's ironic that
we're talking about this. And they're doing these procedures to young women, but then that young
woman in Florida can't have an abortion. It's just like this is where we are in the world right now.
>> Exactly, someone in the chat I thought flash by says men can only get a circumcision if
they have a 3.5 GPA. That would be the American version. And look obviously this is complicated.
>> At one day old. >> Exactly,
as you were just alluding to the variations on this practice in many different places culturally.
It can be different from place to place. I'm hardly an expert on that,
but it seems incredibly bizarre in 2022 that women are being forced to undergo this. And then look
they use the word consent in some cases. I don't know, I'm not an expert. This is not up to me.
It is entirely possible that some people totally consent to it in every meaning of the word,
but there are a lot of people who do not. There could be forms of consent, but
let's give the example cuz my producer has made the text very large.
Hafsah is an individual who didn't want to be known by her real name.
Says in her 30s, she was raped as a child. Afterwards, her Kurdish parents became obsessed
with the idea of presenting her as pure on her wedding night and her father told her there was
a surgery that would ''fix her shame''. Hafsah says, I told them I didn't want the surgery.
But for more than a year, they used emotional blackmail to try to persuade
me. If hymenoplasty had been illegal when I was a teenager,
it would have saved me a lot of emotional abuse. I'm sure it will be a great comfort
to vulnerable girls in a similar position to know that the law is on their side.
It could give them the strength to stand up for themselves.
And so look, I I don't know the life experiences of everybody.
One of the reasons that we look for and do meanwhile in it, cuz I want
to understand more and it's difficult. American media is very American centric.
And so I would love to interview someone to talk more about this. But there's definitely a large
component of family pressure, societal pressure that can really do some damage.
>> There is a lot of worldwide to innocence and purity and virginity for women.
And, we go back to women having control of their own bodies.
It really is the end of the day. And what this woman
is saying is that even though as an adult, she was being pressured by her family which happens.
And and some people, if you look into circumcision,
there was actually female circumcision that was done here in the US for many years.
And it was even in the pediatric guide,
how to show physicians how to do it properly. How to they call it a nick of the clitoris.
And that was done to reduce pleasure. I'm not exactly sure what the psychopathic
thoughts are behind it. But we really need to start empowering women with their own bodies.
Worldwide this needs to be a norm. We need to stop saying you're not purify your rage or if you had
sex before you were a certain age or before you were married.
It's not tied to who we are in our identities and we need to erase that. It's gonna take a
long time coming, cuz it's very tied into our cultures, a lot of people's families.
So this is a step in the UK. I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of pushback from
other cultural groups. They're like well, we need to protect our girls,
thinking that this somehow is protecting them. Exactly, yeah.