NOTE: The Patriotic Vanguard website is off-line. The Wayback Machine has a copy of Statement by African Women Are Free to Choose (AWA-FC), Washington DC, USA. Other copies can be found on the net by searching for "Statement by African Women Are Free to Choose."

A statement by African Women Are Free to Choose (AWA-FC) published in The Patriotic Vanguard on February 20, 2009. Western culture abhors female genital mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision (FC), although the culture accepts and endorses male genital mutatilation (MGM), commonly called male circumcision. The African Women Are Free to Choose organization asks Westerners to leave their female cutting culture alone. The AWA-FC claim that female circumcision is not mutilation.

The statement includes the claim, "That FC was designed by men to control women’s sexuality is a western feminist myth." "We remind the world that all what is being said today about FC - barbaric, dangerous, reduces sexual pleasure, parochial - has also been said about male circumcision by its detractors."

The statement is an interesting look at another culture's viewpoint regarding genital cutting. The African viewpoint of female genital cutting is almost identical to the United States' viewpoint with respect to male genital cutting (male circumcision). Namely, parental rights: "As for those girls too young to give consent, we must accord to their parents the same rights we accord to the parents of boys in neonatal male circumcision and not discriminate on the basis of gender, religion, ethnicity or country of origin."