Being cut, aged 10, led to extraordinary pain and complications in childbirth. Now Hussein’s campaign to end mutilation has led to a staggering change in attitudes

Sadia Hussein had been in labour for three days when she felt she could take no more. She could hear her mother crying in the distance, pleading with God to save her daughter’s life.

But even though things were clearly not progressing as they should have been, the women in her small Kenyan village were resistant to the idea of sending her to hospital. Her mother told her that doctors would “tear her apart” with a pair of scissors; that, at home, they could at least use a razor. “So now, on top of the overwhelming pain of labour, there was this continuous cutting,” Hussein recalls.

I said ‘You are my mother, but you are not the mother of my daughter. I will decide what should happen to my daughter’

The day of circumcision, the wedding night, and the birth of a baby
Are the three feminine sorrows!
I cry for help as my battered flesh tears.
No mercy. Push! They say,
It is only feminine pain,
And feminine pain perishes.

A mother can call the radio, and say: ‘I gave birth to 15 kids and I never saw all the complications you’re talking about.’ I will still know how to challenge her

Related: Kenyan efforts to end FGM suffer blow with victims paraded in ‘open defiance’

Related: ‘On a rampage’: the African women fighting to end FGM

This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.