Gambia Maintains The Prohibition On Female Genital Mutilation

A bill that would have repealed the country of Gambia’s ban on female genital cutting was rejected by lawmakers on Monday. The country is in West Africa.

International campaigners had been closely monitoring the move by this country to become the first in the world to lift such a prohibition.

The vote came after months of contentious discussion in the less than 3 million-person, mostly Muslim country. By rejecting every clause in the plan and avoiding a final vote, lawmakers essentially killed it.

The process, also known as female genital mutilation, involves removing all or part of a girl’s external genitalia. Health professionals or traditional community practitioners frequently perform this treatment using razor blades. Although it is still a common practice in some regions of Africa, it can result in severe bleeding, death, and problems after childbirth.

Human rights organizations and activists feared that years of work against the centuries-old practice—which is frequently carried out on girls under the age of five and is based on ideas of sexual purity and control—would be undone if the ban in the Gambia was reversed.

The movement to lift the prohibition was spearheaded by religious conservatives who claimed that the practice was “one of the virtues of Islam.”