CLT-PLRG Seminar, ‘Do Doctors Have a Right to Perform Medically Unnecessary Genital Operations on Minors?’ by Brian D Earp, University of Oxford

About the event

In the United States, UK, and Australia in the recent years criminal proceedings have been brought against members of a small immigrant Muslim community that practices, for religious reasons, both male circumcision for boys and ‘ritual nicking’ of the vulva for girls. In this community, the typical procedure for girls is less physically invasive than the procedure for boys and neither operation is medically necessary. Yet only the procedure for girls has been considered illegal. Defenders of these practices assume that parents have a right to authorise, and doctors to perform, religious rituals involving genital cutting or tissue-removal on non-consenting (e.g., prepubertal) minors. Opponents claim that temporarily non-autonomous persons of all sex characteristics or gender designations have a right to ‘genital integrity’ that is violated by any genital interference that is not urgently medically necessary. This seminar reviews the ongoing legal and ethical debates in this area and point to key areas requiring further attention.

The Speaker

Brian D. Earp is Senior Research Fellow in Moral Psychology and Co-Director of the Experimental Bioethics Lab at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. His many research interests include the philosophy of love, sex, sexuality, and gender, bodily integrity and children’s rights, the philosophy of technology and human enhancement, and more generally the philosophy and sociology of science and medicine. He recently co-edited, along with Clare Chambers and Lori Watson, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022)