Yesterday, lawmakers in Gambia voted to advance legislation that would legalize female genital cutting. Local analysts believe it is likely to pass.

Women have achieved so much social progress worldwide. Yet genital cutting is still on the rise. Today, 230 million women and girls around the world have been cut, a 15 percent rise from 2016. In Africa and the Middle East, several countries still permit the practice, and in many others, laws are erratically enforced.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain why cutting — which for most communities means removing the clitoris and the labia minora, or almost sealing up the vagina — has been so hard to stamp out.

Fighting a ritual

Most of the people who’ve been cut are from Africa. The practice is almost universal in Somalia and in Guinea, and more than 80 percent of girls undergo the procedure in Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Mali and Sierra Leone. But it also happens in some communities in Iraq, Yemen, Indonesia and Malaysia.

In Africa, the population is growing faster than efforts to stop genital mutilation, which explains why the number of girls who are cut is rising.

Most anti-cutting campaigners locate the roots of the custom in ideas about virginity and control over women’s sexuality. Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered mummies from the fifth century B.C. with mutilated genitals. An archaeologist who studies sites in Somaliland says cutting began as a form of divine sacrifice. Other scholars argue that it is spread across such a vast array of cultures that it was adopted independently by different groups.