Interesting take on the hymenoplasty procedure from an article in Today's Zaman.

The article starts by framing the "need" for hymenoplasty surgery.  This need almost always arising from cultural or religious beliefs:

The issue of women's virginity is still an important factor in many relationships in Turkey, affecting women from all social and economic backgrounds and involving complex intersections of cultural and religious values. The failure to maintain virginity until marriage can for a woman mean social alienation, forced marriage with an inappropriate match, physical abuse and even death in some cases. While there is no true way to ascertain whether or not a woman has had intercourse, modern medicine offers the ability for women to ensure cultural validation of her supposed virginity: hymenoplasty, an increasingly popular elective surgery, the morality of which the medical community is divided on.

But then the thing I found interesting:

“The rise in hymenoplasty doesn't mean that the hymen and virginity have gained importance, but indicates that women are increasingly possessed of more spending power and medical knowledge and that physicians are less conservative with regard to these operations,” psychologist Dilek Tayanç explained in an interview with Sunday's Zaman. “Women have gained economic strength and knowledge over the years, but this development hasn't enabled them to break the taboos regarding virginity, but to more effectively be able to protect themselves from the results of these taboos.”

So while women in certain cultures have not been able to completely break free of the cultural or religious "taboos", they have managed to get a certain amount of buying power and knowledge to help them more effectively manage how those taboos impact them.

While I am of the opinion that no woman should need to get a hymenoplasty procedure to satisfy a cultural or religious belief,  I am not so naive to believe the entire world is there yet.

The good news here is that hymenoplasty is giving these women options and freedom that were not available to them just a few short years ago.

And as long as you are choosing it for yourself and finding a doctor that is experienced, it is your decision to make.

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