Abstract
In April 2017, Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, at that time an emergency medicine physician at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, MI, was arrested and jailed. Together with seven others, she will be among the first persons to be tried under the U.S. federal “Female Genital Mutilation” (FGM) law. While those involved are awaiting their trial, we have observed that the strategic use of stigmatizing terminology used to describe the procedure in public circles, combined with the sidelining of religious perspectives on the meaning of this practice, has obscured nuanced deliberation over the complex issues female genital cutting (FGC) raises. Perhaps most saliently, the case highlights the porous boundaries of medical practice in multicultural societies, and challenges the ethical and legal bases of “medicalizing” religious and cultural practices.