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Khadija Gbla’s first baby is due in February.
Gbla was delighted to find out she was having a boy. She has bought a pram, but between home renovations and a busy job she has not managed to put together a nursery yet, or even buy a cot. She is also trying to fight off the thought that she and her son could die during the delivery.
When Gbla was nine or 10, as part of the family’s preparation for migrating to Australia from Sierra Leone, her mother took her to a hut where an old woman cut out her clitoris with a rusty knife. “She then threw the piece of flesh across the room like it was the most disgusting thing she’d ever seen,” Gbla recalled in a Tedx Canberra talk.
Now she fears that ignorance about female genital mutilation (FGM) among Australian doctors and midwives could add dangerous pregnancy complications to the long list of traumas inflicted by the practice.
“I kind of feel I will go in and have a baby and [it] will feel like a second FGM procedure. I feel like it could be the second traumatising experience of my life,” she tells Guardian Australia from her Adelaide home.