A mother has caused outrage after posting a photo of her baby daughter with a facial ‘piercing’.
The post, which has since gone viral, shows her daughter with a diamond stud in her cheek.
Enedina Vance uploaded the photo on her Facebook account with the caption:
So I got the baby girl’s dimple pierced, It looks so cute, right? I just know she’s gonna love it. She’ll thank me when she’s older lol.
The post continued:
If she decides she doesn’t like it, she can just take it out, no big deal. I’m the parent, she is my child, I will do whatever I want. I made her, I own her.
The photo has been shared over 13,000 times, but Enedina has since explained that all isn’t as it seems.
Despite people angrily commenting and targeting Enedina with abuse – some even threatened to call social services – they failed to see the hashtag ‘sarcasm’ and the deeper meaning behind the photoshopped image.
Enedina revealed that she wanted to shock parents and start a debate about the rights and wrongs of parents altering their children’s bodies.
Ms Vance said that she’s been campaigning against child circumcision, after being asked by a doctor in 1998 whether she wanted her son’s foreskin removed.
Despite there being religious and cultural reasons, as well as medical and hygiene concerns for a child to be circumcised, Enedina said she wanted to make it clear that some parents, who thought it was outrageous to have a child’s face pierced, would have no problem with choosing to have a child circumcised.
Taking to Facebook again she said:
So it appears that the focus was on how insane it would be if a parent were to modify and alter their child by forcing them to undergo a facial piercing.
People were outraged & rightfully so, then the photo became the focus, was it real or was it Photoshopped?
Her post continued:
Then, as the post was shared, people began to realise it was about children’s rights to physical integrity.
Altering a child’s body simply for aesthetic reasons is wrong … so why are ear piercings and genital cutting so popular?
One Facebook user responded:
Sounds like you’ve made a lot of people aware of their guilty consciences.
If they felt they truly had nothing to feel guilty about, they would ignore the underlying message of your post and move on instead of being incensed by it.
Enedina said the post has accumulated more attention than ‘she could ever have imagined’.
