Well, yay, BUT (pedantic point perhaps)...
Ministers pledge to ‘reset the dial’ on women’s health in England: After 100,000 women voiced concerns, plans include menopause support, GP training and banning ‘virginity repair’ operations. On Wednesday night, ministers pledged to introduce legislation criminalising hymenoplasty or any procedure to rebuild or repair the hymen. Such surgery creates scar tissue so that a woman will bleed the next time she has intercourse, making it appear she has never had sex. Young women can be forced to prove they are “pure” on their wedding night. Doctors have called for a ban on the surgery for years, saying it can never be justified on health grounds and is harmful.
I can't help feeling that a) this is something that docs should not have been doing on ethical grounds (hello, ye Hippocractick oath, and 'first do no harm'?) even without the invocation of the law;
and b) is it not more than high time, in this particular year (whatever calendar you are using) that there should be a general awareness that THERE IS NO DEFINITIVE PHYSICAL SIGN THAT ANY GIVEN WOMAN IS A VIRGIN*, 'proof' does not exist.
The desire for a woman to shed blood on her wedding night is icky, to say the least, in the extreme, in particular when we consider that her natural, periodic, menstrual bleeding is still regarded as repugnant and even taboo in many quarters.
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*We cite, of course, that fine and compendious volume on the subject by Professor Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History (2007); and remark that our own delvings into C19th-early C20th works of medical jurisprudence indicate that, in fact, doctors of that period recognised that the matter was, indeed, evasive and pretty much unprovable.
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