New Telegraph

Include FGM in antenatal, postnatal services, group tells health workers

A group, Centre for Social Value and Early Childhood Development(CESVED), has called on medical practitioners in Nigeria to include Female Genital Mutilation(FGM) in their ante-natal and post-natal services for pregnant women and nursing mothers so as to eradicate the practice in the country.

The group explained that the best place to start the fight against FGM was in hospitals during ante-natal and post-natal care. Chairman, Board of Trustees of the non-governmental organisation, Chief Augustine Abu stated this in Afikpo, Afikpo North Local Government Area, Ebonyi state during two day training of health workers to end FGM in the state. He disclosed that FGM affected child development and that children who experienced it, have low mentality and low self-esteem. He accused medical practitioners of promoting FGM by mutilating the girl child instead of ending it which he said was why the training was organised to put a stop to it. Abu said “the most painful thing you can do to a man is a woman without clitoris.

I am a man, the most painful thing that will ever happen to a man is a man having by his side a woman that does not have clitoris. It is the one of the one of the worst thing that can happen to a man. The medical practitioners are not helping matters over these Female Genital Mutilation, some of them promote it.

“Here in Ebonyi state, FGM is medicalized partially. When you are tracing a certain cultural history and the practitioners of these certain culture. We talk about the western and the tradition, as long as I am concerned, you are in between the tradition and the western because these people come from the community you attend to them.

We all acquired western education that has to talk about protection of lives most especially preserving it very well and your ethics as medical practitioners. Now, the issue is how many of you on your own have been able to counsel these women during antenatal and during postnatal because that is the foundation that ending FGM will start from. “When the mother is pregnant, the child learn more intelligent in the stomach than when the baby is out. What we are doing today is acquired in the stomach but when the baby is out, the baby is struggling between 30-40 per cent but the 60-70 per cent is acquired in the mother’s womb.

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