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Doctors in surgery. There’s been a scary rise in the number of women and teen girls getting unnecessary labiaplasties, researchers said.
A shocking number of teen girls and women are undergoing plastic surgery on their vaginas to replicate what they see in pornography, British researchers said.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reported a fivefold increase in labiaplasties, which are considered cosmetic surgeries, over ten years.
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Experts attribute the sharp uptick, in part, to porn.
“The misapprehension arises from the prominence of just one type of ‘neat’ genital appearance, the type to be found prominently depicted in pornography,” Thomas Baldwin of RCOG’s ethics committee, told Agence France-Presse.
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The paper examines the dangers associated with these surgeries, which aren’t medically necessary.
“The younger a girl begins her labiaplasty trajectory, the higher the number of operations over her lifetime and the greater the risk of scarring and sensitivity loss,” researchers wrote.
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The operations aren’t recommended for women under age 18, whose vaginas aren’t fully developed.
In Britain, 2,000 of these operations were performed in 2010, according to the report. But experts say the true number is much higher, as that figure doesn’t take into account surgeries done in the private sector.
The trend is also growing in the United States, despite a 2007 warning to physicians from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, to consider the “medical validity and safety” of female genital cosmetic surgery, Reuters reported.
