In a move that activists are calling a milestone - and that most reasonable people would call 'finally' - Colombia last week became the first country in Latin America to outlaw female genital mutilation (FGM). The bill passed unanimously in Colombia's Congress, capping a long battle to eradicate a practice that is as dangerous as it is secretive.
Take Carla Quiñonez's story. Her daughter was just six months old when the baby's great-grandmother subjected her to FGM behind Quiñonez's back. When the grandmother returned the infant, she had a fever, was swollen and bleeding, and cried constantly. Quiñonez confronted her grandmother, who dismissed it as normal and swore her to secrecy. The nearest health centre was a long journey away, so Quiñonez's mother, a midwife, tried to ease the baby's pain with medicinal plants. The grandmother's reasoning? 'Men make fun of women who have a clitoris.' Ah, yes, the age-old clitoris-shaming defense.
FGM, for the uninitiated, involves the partial or total removal of external female genitalia for non-medical reasons. It can cause haemorrhaging, infection, complications with periods and childbirth, and - shockingly - make it difficult for women to experience sexual pleasure. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 230 million girls and women alive today have been cut, predominantly in Africa.
Quiñonez, 30, has been campaigning to eradicate the practice in Colombia, where it's still practised by members of her Emberá Indigenous community. Along with fellow activists and Congress members, she played a key role in the campaign leading to the ban. Growing up, she noticed something odd: 'I always wondered why more girls than boys seemed to die shortly after birth.' A young cousin, born healthy, died three days later - her mother blamed 'jai,' an ancestral illness. Quiñonez now suspects those girls actually died from FGM complications.
Between 2020 and June 2026, 240 cases of FGM were recorded in Colombia, mostly in girls under six. But paediatrician Diana Ramos Mosquera calls that 'the tip of the iceberg.' At San Jorge University Hospital in Pereira, she's seen scarring, burning, and mutilation in girls examined for other conditions. One girl arrived with her vaginal opening sealed shut, requiring reconstructive surgery. Dr Ramos views FGM as sexual and gender-based violence with lifelong consequences, but stresses that education, not just punishment, is key: 'Some members of these communities genuinely believe they are doing no harm.'
With around 300,000 members, the Great Emberá Nation is one of Colombia's largest Indigenous communities, also spanning Ecuador and Panama. Why do they practise FGM when it's rare elsewhere in Latin America? Theories range from the practice arriving with enslaved Africans (explaining its prevalence in Risaralda, Chocó, and Valle del Cauca, areas with large Afro-Colombian populations) to an ancient fear that the clitoris will grow into a penis if not cut, to the patriarchal belief that a woman with a pleasure organ might get promiscuous. Because of course.
Juliana Domico, legal representative and chief Indigenous councillor to the National Confederation of the Peoples of the Great Emberá Nation, rejects the cultural defense: 'Our culture is our clothing, our crafts, our dances and our language, not a practice that kills. Culture does not kill.' She hopes the law translates into public policy with sufficient resources.
Quiñonez has faced threats for her advocacy, especially from men. Traditionally, men aren't supposed to know about the ritual, yet conversations about abolition often happen only with male leaders because many Emberá women speak only the indigenous language and not Spanish. This also blocks women from seeking medical help. When Quiñonez took her daughter to hospital for a fever from a urinary tract infection, a nurse berated her for 'being a savage' and threatened to have the baby taken away. Unsurprisingly, she now avoids hospitals, treating her daughter with medicinal plants and medication.
There is change afoot, though. Women in the Emberá community are starting to discuss whether FGM should happen. One grandmother, reflecting on mutilating her granddaughters, said she 'had never acted out of malice and had only wanted to prevent men from criticising her granddaughters.' Quiñonez acknowledges the pain of these conversations: 'Women who have grown up without a clitoris cannot imagine a different body.' But she plans to talk to her own daughter about it one day, because 'all of us deserve to understand our bodies and to talk about them without shame.'
Here's hoping Colombia's new law marks the beginning of the end for a practice that should have been extinct centuries ago.