HB644 (Rep. Chestnut)

DESCRIPTION: Female genital mutilation is the practice of partially or totally removing the external genitalia of a girl or young woman for nonmedical reasons and has been criminalized in the United States federally and in multiple states. This bill would establish the crime of female genital mutilation, provide criminal penalties, and provide an exception only under limited circumstances when medically necessary.

STATUS: Bill was just introduced and has been assigned to the House Judiciary Committee.

BACKGROUND & OUR POSITION:

This legislation has been an Eagle Forum priority bill and has bipartisan history, twice needing only one more vote in the Senate to become law. Republican leadership with Democrat colleagues should push this needed criminal bill over the finish line, and both Parties can celebrate a win for girls.

Representative Rod Scott of Fairfield brought this bill to the Legislature in 2017 when his brother-in-law, Dr. Grosbeck Parham, a gynecological oncologist also of Fairfield, working in the Sudan, called Rep. Scott about the horrors of this procedure. We’ve provided a quick link to a 2022 “Capitol Journal” discussion with Rep. Scott on the bill and how he came to bring it. (Minute 22:40, https://www.pbs.org/video/april-15-2021-nb8nuc/ )

A surgeon in Detroit, Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, was performing this atrocity on girls brought to her, even over state lines, Minnesota being a frequent line crossed. Upon her arrest and case, a federal judge declared the situation a state’s issue to criminalize. This declaration was confusing as Congress had passed legislation in 1996 prohibiting FGM, but states quickly began to pass their own laws. Reports have shown over 500K minor girls in this country are at risk of FGM, and that is an older number.

The bill grew traction, introduced in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, the cosponsors growing tremendously on the Right and the Left. Scott was one of the first in the U.S. to draft a bill, but still no Alabama law.

One clause in the bill prohibits taking girls out of the state for the procedure. To explain why that is there, this is typically done in the summer and is referred to as “Vacation Cutting” by opponents. A federal ban was passed, Transport for FGM, during the Obama years, to prohibit taking girls out of the country (true, hard to enforce), but that travel is why that clause is in the bill, to prohibit the same travel between states for the procedure, as the Narwala case shows is indeed happening in the USA. Texas indicted a woman for transporting a girl to the UK in 2021.

The timing is good; the time remaining, slim. In addition to the vetting from previous years, Alabama since has defined a woman, and Alabama has criminalized other surgical amputations for trans purposes, so we are ready to prohibit this permanent mutilation. The medical field has put its wording there, and the consensus between the Parties has been proven in this legislative body, twice.

Let’s head into these elections and into the future with this horror being a crime in Alabama, not a religious rite when it comes to minor girls.