British gynaecologists express shock over five-fold rise in female genital cosmetic surgery cases

British gynaecologists warned yesterday that increasing numbers of teenage girls and women are undergoing genital cosmetic surgery, driven in part by unrealistic images of how they should look based on pornography.

The state-funded National Health Service (NHS) performed more than 2,000 labial reduction procedures - labiaplasties - in 2010, a five-fold increase in 10 years, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG).

This is "probably the tip of the iceberg compared to the number of procedures that are done in the private sector" where the data is not routinely collected, said Professor Sarah Creighton from the college's ethics committee.

She said there had been no similar increase in labial disease in the last decade to explain the trend, suggesting instead a confusion about what represents "normal" genitalia.

"The misapprehension arises from the prominence of just one type of 'neat' genital appearance, the type to be found prominently depicted in pornography," said Thomas Baldwin, a philosopher who sits on RCOG's ethics committee.