By Lynn Moore, Emotional Recovery Coach and Author of “Born to Bounce Back”
Warning #1: You are about to see another side of me. The Angry Advocate side.
When I love, I love very deeply. Unfortunately, this also leaves me open to feeling its opposite; very deep pain. This pain is quite often not for myself, but for the dreadful treatment of human beings by other human beings. In this particular case, my sister women.
Warning #2: Among other things in this article, I will be mentioning FGM (female genital mutilation)
Why?
Because far too many people have never heard of it.
- Because I see the rise, in the western world, of a new war on women in order to strip them of decades of hard-won rights that should have been automatic at birth.
- I see women dying due to pregnancy miscarriages because they are now, in 2025, denied healthcare for this procedure.
A few years ago, no one would have thought this barbarism would ever occur in a modern, enlightened society, yet here it is.
And this is just the beginning.
Anything and everything can recur, especially when due to human ignorance. To think otherwise is to bury our heads in the sand. As an example, we thought we had eradicated Polio around the world, yet here it is again, due to stupidity, ready to paralyze, deform and kill our children.
There is another ancient atrocity still plaguing females
Notably in African and Middle East countries, but is still practiced around the world.
Imagine this: you have a beloved female child in your own or extended family, I want you to imagine her as an infant or toddler delivered, often by her own mother, to another woman appointed to the task of cutting and mutilating this little girl’s external genitalia. Using dirty, multiple-use knives, no anesthesia, no protection from infection. Yes, it is the women in these societies who perform these mutilations. Why? Because of centuries of lies drilled into them.
A girl is left with a litany of manners in which she will suffer, for the rest of her life, due to beliefs that if this horror isn’t performed, she will not be “marriageable” and she is deemed unclean and unhygienic. Or, she might experience the act of intercourse as enjoyable and thus do it, “at every opportunity” with men other than her husband. Just more strategies, in the guise of ‘tradition’ to shame, dehumanize and debase women.
You think it cannot happen today, in free, modern, or westernized countries?
Ask the families of the women who, in recent months have died by exsanguination and/or infection, during untreated miscarriages in hospitals where doctors and nurses stood aside and did nothing. Or, send her to her car in the hospital parking lot where she suffers and dies. Or she’s sent home where she dies on the bathroom floor for her husband or child to find her.
Why were these women left to die? Because medical staff feared they would be arrested for performing an abortion! In which case they would lose their medical license and in some locations, be sent to jail.
Politicians did this.
I repeat, anything and everything can recur!
It’s happening NOW. In the new “Dark Ages”
If you think this is hard to read or may be inappropriate for social media, think instead, of the women who have and will continue to suffer and die at the hands of the Powerful Ignorant .
Think of their loved ones who will grieve these unnecessary deaths for the remainder of their lives. Think of the child or children whose mother has been unnecessarily wrenched out of their lives forever. They have suffered a sudden, pivotal catastrophe; their lives have permanently dropped into a deep hole with no ladder.
Now, place your feet into their shoes. Put a beloved woman in your life into their story. Feel their deep sorrow and pain. Feel your responding empathy.
Next, do something, anything to support women in this new age of hatred.
“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is when good men [people] do nothing” – #Edmond Burke
A few days from now, the most powerful country in the world will inaugurate a new president. A president-elect who has made it extremely clear what he will do to bring his country into chaos. How he will continue to wreak havoc on the lives of women in particular, due to the misogyny of he and his political cohorts. Not only will they pass a Federal Law against abortion and a woman’s rights over her own body, but they have four years to make things exponentially worse.
So don’t sit by, maybe cry a tear or two over coffee with a friend, and still do nothing.
We do have a voice. And I have used it here. You can too. Circulate this article, write your own letter, ask other women and men if they know of FGM, suggest others watch the movie “Desert Flower” mentioned below. MAKE NOISE!
Remember: Everything and Anything….
I recommend: reading this piece published by UNICEF:
https://www.spotlightinitiative.org/news/film-helping-end-female-genital-mutilation-mali
I also recommend this movie, “Desert Flower” that is the true story of a woman (Waris Dirie) subjected to FGM as a child. She became famous for spending her life dedicated to the eradication of FGM and was eventually invited to speak at the United Nations on the subject. The complete 2009 film can be found on Youtube and Prime Video.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waris_Dirie
From: “THE BOOK COMMENTARY“
