Angel,

Please remember you have lots of time.  At the end of the day and when your baby is all grown up into a sexual human being, it won’t matter if you wait another 6 months, 6 years, or even leave the decision to her.  If you leave it to her, she can have it done and participate in the decisions about her body and no physical harm will have occurred.  Same thing with the vaginal surgery---your baby doesn’t need a vagina right now and in fact, recent research shows an 89% resurgery rate for surgeries done with the so-called latest technique (Creighton and Minto, 2001).  These were all surgeries sold to parents as one step procedures.  As long as she doesn’t have any urinary tract problems, there isn’t any rush because the surgery is mostly cosmetic, except for the vagina part and even with that, she doesn’t need it until she starts to get her period.

Ask the doctor if he can give your name and number to people he operated on as infants and are sexually active adults now for references, not just pictures of other babies because there is no way for anyone to predict if everything is good and working right by looking at a picture.  You really can’t predict the success of this kind of surgery done during infancy until the girl is all grown up and having sex with someone she loves.  That love part is important too because sex is kind of different if it is with someome we just kind of like as opposed to someone we really love.  I know for me, it wasn’t until I realized that difference that I also realized I didn’t know what I was missing and what had been taken away from me.

Spend lots of time doing as much research as you can.  There is a ton of research available online too.  Try going to scholar.google.com and typing in some stuff.

Also, be real aware of your daughter’s privacy---you don’t need to allow all those doctors not directly involved in her care to examine her.  They are just curious and your daughter shouldn’t be allowed to be their afternoon freak show.

Maybe make a comparision chart with reasons for and reasons against having surgery now.  Think about things like what the research shows (almost all show bad results when they talk to adults and none of them show promising results).  Don’t fall in the trap of thinking things are better now then they were because in 20 years the doctors will be saying the same thing--that girls who had it done as infants in the early 2000’s had outdated techniques.  Do you know one doctor actually said about unhappy adult women, "They should just get over it"!  He’s currently a practicing urologist in San Francisco!  He may be saying the same thing about his current patients one day or some other doctor may say the same thing about his.

Betsy