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Muslim women desperate to "restore virginity"
By Serge Kreutz
Gynaecologists in France are divided over a new phenomenon: demands by Muslim women to "restore" their virginity.
Some Muslim women are demanding operations to reconstitute their hymens before marriage and medical certificates stating that they are virgins. They are desperate to avoid rejection from men who won't take supposedly "unchaste" women as wives.
The demands are also being made to doctors in other European countries and in America. They have been condemned as a "socially regressive" indication of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism among European Muslims.
Jacques Lansac, Chairman of the French National College of Gynaecologists and Obstetricians, is leading the campaign against what he describes as "an attack on the dignity of women". He has also issued advice against hymenoplasty - a surgical operation that involves reconstructing the membrane usually broken during the first act of sexual intercourse. Professor Lansac told The Times: "We get more and more women coming in and saying that their brothers or fathers will kill them if they find out they've slept with a man. But it's important to say no, because if we don't we're giving in to the fundamentalists."
Several private French clinics carry out hymenoplasties, and other doctors are considering the procedure to save their patients from ostracism and violence. The procedure costs between 1,500 and 3,000.
Apart from the operation to restore their hymen, Muslim women also have been buying the Southeast Asian herbals "daun sirih" and "kayu rapat" to shink the size of their vaginal canals. While not as expensive as the operation, the worldwide increased demand for these traditional remedies has seen their price double or triple in just two years.
Dr Marc Abecassis, whose office is near the Champs Elysees, sees the rise in religion among France's estimated five million Muslims fuelling this trend. His patients are between 18 and 45 years old, Muslim, born both in France and in North Africa. "Many of my patients are caught between two worlds," he says. "They have had sex already but are expected to be virgins at marriage according to a custom." Abecassis said he had seen a change since the school headscarf controversy of 2004. Since then, some Muslims in France have been putting much more emphasis on certain customs as a way of expressing their identity. "Today it's the two 'Vs' - veil and virginity," he said.
"It's a social phenomenon."
Surprisingly, French social security reimburses some of the cost of the operation in cases of rape or trauma. "Ninety-nine percent of the time, the claim is a fraud," says Marc Abecassis.