Laura you are going to have to comes to terms with the decision you made for your daughter just as I have had to come to terms with the decision my parents made for me.  If it were true that today's surgical techniques were tried and true I would not be posting on this subject but the fact is that current surgical techniques for clitoral surgery have not been in use long enough to know the physical and psychological impact on the patient.

The positive assessments of the various techniques for clitoral surgeries being done today have been made by the surgeons who perform those techniques, not by the patients, and have emphasized the pleasing cosmetic result. There have been no large scale, long term follow up studies on the results of these surgeries. The few studies that have been done have emphasized the cosmetic result; the physical and emotional impact on the patient is given little consideration. It takes many years before it is possible to assess the impact of the surgery on erotic sensation, a fact that effectively makes all of the current techniques for clitoral surgery experimental. Doctor New has even acknowledged that in her letter: "New ways to save the clitoral innervation have been developed, but it is not yet determined if this effective in preserving clitoral sensation." To make matters worse, current techniques are based on outdated and inaccurate information. The recent (1999) work by Larry Baskin, a urology surgeon at UCSF, and an expert in such surgery, has shown that the model of clitoral innervation underlying so called "modern" clitoral reduction surgeries is simply wrong. (Baskin, LS, A Erol, YW Li, WH Liu, E Kurzrock, and GR Cunha. 1999. Anatomical studies of the human clitoris. Journal of Urology 162 (3 Part 2)1015-20.)   

Until these long term studies are done and parents are informed of the results, I will continue to try to inform those who are contemplating future clitoral surgery for their daughters of these facts.

Joan