The adoptive parents of a child born with male and female organs say South Carolina mutilated their son by choosing a gender and having his male genitalia surgically removed. The surgery took place
when the child was 16 months old and a ward of the state, according to a
lawsuit filed by the parents against three doctors and several members
of South Carolina Department of Social Services.
The child's biological
mother was deemed unfit, and the biological father had apparently
abandoned him, according to the suit. So others made the decision. The child, now 8 years old, feels more like a boy and "wants to be a normal boy," his adoptive mother said.
"It's become more and
more difficult just as his identity has become more clearly male, the
idea of that mutilation was done to him has become more and more real,"
Pamela Crawford said in a video released by the Southern Poverty Law Center which is assisting in the case. "There was no medical reason that this decision had to be made," Crawford said.
Marilyn Matheus,
spokeswoman for the South Carolina Department of Social Services, said
the agency does not have any comment on the pending litigation. The suit says the surgery
took place within the Greenville Hospital System. Spokeswoman Sandy
Dees also said she would not comment because of the litigation.
The child, identified in
the lawsuit as "M.C.," refuses to be called a girl and lives as a boy.
His family, friends, school, religious leaders and pediatrician support
his identity. "We just let him follow his instincts as much as we can," his adoptive father, John Mark Crawford, said in the video. Crawford said performing gender-assignment surgery on an infant robbed her child of making the decision for himself.
"I would have never made
the decision to choose the gender either way," she said. "What I would
have been working with is how do we preserve as much functioning in
either direction because we can't know what this child's gender identity
is going to be."
The lawsuit claims
doctors at a state hospital and Department of Social Services workers
"decided to remove M.C.'s healthy genital tissue and radically
restructure his reproductive organs in order to make his body appear to
be female." The suit says the
surgery violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that no state
shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due
process of law."
The suit also asks for "compensatory damages in an amount to be determined at trial." But the adoptive father
said the real intent of the lawsuit "is just to uphold these
constitutional principles -- integrity of a person's body, and some kind
of due process for infants where people around them in power are
considering doing surgeries like this."
Pamela Crawford agreed. "I would give anything for this to not have been done to our child," she said. "I don't want it to happen to any more kids."
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