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re: re: re: re: New Baby girl - unsure about surgery Oct. 20th, 2005 12:04pm
Taking a decision regarding surgery is very stressful, particularly when we are deciding what to do with another person's body. Your decision should be only yours and the only I feel I can do for you is to share my own decision-making struggle. My husband and I decided avoid surgery unless it was urgent and strictly medically necessary. So our daughter only had a very small corrective surgery when she turned 1 year, because we discovered that some or her urine was going back to one of her kidneys.
It took a long time to decide what to do, but we finally decided to wait mainly for 3 reasons. First, science is progressing markedly. Perhaps in 5 or 10 years we will have additional surgical techniques that are unavailable right now. So it seems logical to me to think that when my daughter reaches teenagehood, in 11 years or so, she will have the opportunity to take advantage of scientific progress in the field of urology. Second, I love my daughter very dearly, she is my blood and flesh, but I do not feel like I "own" her body. Thus I really feel that she is ultimately the only person who can decide what to do with her body. I think by the time she is a teen or preteen she might be able to understand what an orgasm is and what she may risk with a reduction of the size of her clitoris. Pardon my bluntness, no offense, but I do not think parents, sisters/brothers, husbands, or friends should have the right of irreversibly modifying a baby's body, unless it is for a medical reason. And, in my mind, a clitoral reduction is never medically necessary. Finally, I red some scholarly articles suggesting that the best time to have surgery done is during teenagehood because estrogen levels increases markedly then, facilitating healing.
Hope all this help! Good luck taking your decision.
