Mum who 'pierced' her baby's cheek to make parenting point is now receiving death threats.

The mother who stirred a worldwide debate over a photograph of her baby with a pierced cheek has received death threats over the doctored image.

Enedina Vance of Ohio, USA, photoshopped the diamond onto her daughter’s dimple last week in an attempt to highlight what she sees as the “hypocrisy” of parents who are pro-circumcision.

“I’m the parent, she is MY CHILD, I will do whatever I want,” she wrote in the sarcastic Facebook post. “I make all of her decisions until she’s 18, I made her, I own her!! I don’t need anyone’s permission, I think it’s better, cuter.”

The post garnered worldwide media coverage and more than 12,000 shares. But in a subsequent status, Vance said it also earned her “hundreds of hate mail messages” from people who failed to recognise that the image wasn’t real.

“I seriously can not believe how many people missed that this was purely satirical,” she wrote on Facebook. “I actually used the hashtag #sarcasm lol yet people were still threatening to beat me to death, call child protective services, & take away my children.” [sic]

Parents, need a sympathetic voice in your ear? Check out This Glorious Mess. (Post continues below.)

She continued, “In a way, I’m glad people responded the way they did. I didn’t take any of their comments, anger, or hate to heart. They were, in their own way, try to protect my baby.”

In fact, what most disappointed Vance wasn’t the threats, it was that more people didn’t engage with her intended cause.

“How is it so triggering, so enraging to see my baby with a pierced dimple, but actually knowing a baby is being strapped down and forcibly having his most sensitive and innervated portion of his penis amputated, seems perfectly OK?,” she wrote. “How can society threaten death over one, but encourage and support the other?”