Demand for treatment from victims of female genital mutilation has increased ‘significantly’ – The Irish Times

Application for a service to help women affected by female genital mutilation (FGM) has increased by more than 300% in two years, a new report has found.

FGM is the partial or total removal of the female external genitalia or other damage to the female genitalia for non-medical reasons. It is estimated that at least 10,000 women and girls living in Ireland have experienced this.

right Irish Family Planning Association Annual report 2023, the association offered 55 FGM appointments in 2021, but this increased by 338% to 241 last year. There is now a waiting list for the service, with the association saying it is struggling to meet the level of demand.

The association’s medical director, Caitriona Henchion, said the number of people treated was “small initially”, but from 2020/2021 migration from “high-incidence countries has increased, so demand has increased enormously”.

“A lot of times they haven’t been in the country very long, they don’t have English and they have a lot of trauma before coming here or their journey here. So they are long and complex consultations,” Dr. Henchion said.

She said the consequences of FGM include pain during urination, menstrual blood, as well as extreme pain during or inability to have intercourse. People go on dates to deal with the physical implications, but also the psychological impact.

“We’re at a point where one service can’t do it all. The way IPAS (International Protection Accommodation Service) works is that people first come to Dublin and join the waiting list, but they might live in Killarney until they are called off the waiting list and have to travel all the way . here,” she said.

“Other services are needed in other locations.”

Separately, the association also provided an analysis of the mandatory three-day waiting period for access to abortion services, which found that nearly 98 percent of women who sought abortions there in the past three years followed through on their decision.

Of the 497 clients who were verified as subject to the waiting period last year, 426 accessed an early medical abortion at the association.

The vast majority of these clients had pregnancies under eight weeks of gestation. Sixteen percent were under six weeks, 38 percent were six to seven weeks, 29 percent were seven to eight weeks, 14.5 percent were eight to nine weeks, and 2.4 at one hundred had nine to 10 weeks.

About 64 of the other 71 clients accessed abortion care outside the association after the waiting period. They either chose to have an abortion under the care of a family doctor or were referred to a hospital for abortion care for a variety of clinical reasons.

Seven clients decided to continue the pregnancy. This means that 98.5% of clients subject to the mandatory waiting period had an abortion.

When the three-year analysis is complete, the proportion of those who had an abortion was 97.9 percent, the report said.

Dr. Henchion said the waiting period “affects some people more than others” and should be removed because it is “unfounded in science. It was practically taken out of the sky. For some people, it’s a relatively minor inconvenience, but for others who find out they’re pregnant further along, it can sometimes prevent them from accessing care within the 12-week limit.”