Bullied Teen Gets Free Plastic Surgery (PHOTO)
This is Nadia Ilse. Nadia is fourteen years old, and since she was in the first grade, she has been a victim of bullying. Why? Because her peers thought that her ears stuck out too much.
Nadia has frequently endured taunts of “Dumbo” and “elephant ears” from bullies, which caused the formerly talkative, happy girl to become shy and quiet. At age 10, Nadia begged her mother to pay for an operation to have her ears pinned back in order to stop the bullying. At age 14, she got what she wanted.
The Little Baby Face Foundation, which “transforms the lives of children born with facial deformities through corrective surgery,” offered to give Nadia the surgery she wanted, free of charge. Dr. Thomas Romo III, founder of the charity, brought Nadia and her mother to New York and gave the girl approximately $40,000 worth of surgery. Not only did doctors ‘fix’ Nadia’s ears, they also ‘fixed’ her nose and chin. Now she looks like this:
Nadia couldn’t be happier with her new face.
“I look beautiful, this is exactly what I wanted, I love it,” she said.
“Reconstruction of a congenital facial birth defect is one of the most gratifying of all surgeries. The transformation of young, shy children into proud self-confident youngsters is truly amazing,” says Dr. Thomas Romo III.
This type of surgery is fairly easily justifiable in the case of severe facial deformity, but the ethics are more dubious in Nadia’s case. Is changing the appearance of a bullying victim the correct way to deal with bullying? And, more controversially, is it right to perform a nose job and chin reduction on a 14 year old girl even though her nose and chin are not the subject of the taunts?
What do you think?
