What is done to girls is the equivalent of chopping off the entire head of a guy's dick.
no, not always, and that is definitely not the form that American doctors typically grapple with.
Docs will remove the entire foreskin of the penis yet they won't even prick the clitoris? How does that makes sense?
yep...
The (bad and untenable) reasons it currently happens like this is because
1. male mutilation is culturally accepted in our part of the world and thus hardly anyone stands up to the improper application of religious freedom,
2. it can be medically justified for infants in certain cases and for adults and is thus seen as a medical procedure, and
3. because there is no slippery slope argument on the male side.
For females,
2. there is no way for doctors to medically justify it and see it as anything other than what it really is, and
3. there is a slippery slope argument about where you can draw the line between all of the possible forms of FGM: ritual prick, small clitoral incision, clitoral scraping, and then of course all the progressively worse versions. What happens if the ritual prick is allowed by doctors in order that the families don't perform a more harmful or nonsterile form of FGM themselves, but then a family shows up to your office asking for a clitoral incision procedure with the same reasoning?
1. Finally, FGM is not culturally accepted in our part of the world and therefore fallacious religious freedom arguments are properly disregarded (
similar to how an American doctor would never agree to perform non-medical, cosmetic, permanently disfiguring African ash+scar tattoos on infants because of their parents religious/cultural beliefs...and I believe this also answers your former question about the ear lobe that the others were so typically unable to answer).
Therefore, my stance is still the same: I would not perform either male or female genital mutilations on a non-consenting infant for any non-medical reason; they can get the procedure for themselves once they are adults, if they wish. As long as male mutilation remains legal, I would ensure my patients had full access to the procedure by referring them to another physician whom I trust to carry out the procedure well and safely...i.e. not a rabbi who is swarming with herpes.