Nose Jobs Are Okay, But Implants Aren't?

Posting Date: 01/04/2001

The mother who planned to bestow her daughter with the gift of breast implants for the teen's 16th birthday now says she will follow the surgeon's advice to wait a few more years.

A child psychologist, too, had warned that the girl is at risk emotionally by "making a decision now when she's a child that will have long term repercussions that she can't consider yet, she hasn't got the perspective."

For years, you have heard me rant and rave against circumcision based on the moral right of a child to be left intact. So I would like to know if these experts, a plastic surgeon and a child psychologist, condone parents who have a knife taken to their infant's genitals? What about those "long term repercussions"?

Except in certain necessary cases, we are not supposed to do plastic surgery on minors, but it's done all the time -- nose jobs for example. So why shouldn't a breast implant operation be okay?

I'll bet too that if this girl had wanted breast reduction surgery that procedure would have been done without question. Breast reduction in young girls happens all the time with no public muss and fuss. Large breasts in a teenager gets medicalized, so we think surgery is the thing to do.

This issue calls for us to examine the inconsistencies in our judgement. As a society, we believe in a parent's right to mutilate a baby's genitals; we don't think twice about snipping a kid's nose; but a teen's request for breast implants "to boost her self-confidence" has met with "fierce controversy."

The girl's mother has had breast implants herself and says, "I don't want her to grow up with hang-ups about the way she looks." Well, I've raised teenagers and I've been a teenager. Surviving hang-ups about looks is part of being a teenager.

I know most of you think this girl is too young for this surgery, and I happen to agree. But why is a nose job okay and a breast implant isn't?

Source: BBC News, January 4, 2001

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