UNITED STATES
Raw Story
ERIN CORBETT
06 DEC 2016
dR. Renée Bergstrom broke the silence about her experience with female genital mutilation as a child. She recounted how when she was just three years old she was taken to the doctor to have her clitoris removed, Bergstrom wrote for the Guardian.
Bergstrom is now 72 years old, but is now breaking the silence about female genital mutilation, which happened in white, Midwest America. She wrote of her Christian mother taking her to a church clinic to have the procedure as a “‘cure’ for masturbation.”
“My mother was concerned that I was masturbating, and my face turned very red,” Bergstrom shared in a video that accompanied her piece. “She took me to a doctor who said, ‘Well I can fix that,’ and cut off my clitoris.”
“As I was growing older, she told me she knew it was a mistake and that I was not supposed to ever talk about it,” she said.
“I remember the excruciating pain and feeling betrayed,” she wrote. “I was told not to talk about it, but keeping the secret meant I was alone with my questions as I grew into puberty: what was missing? What would it be like to be ‘whole’?”
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