Harm reduction and female genital alteration: a response to the commentaries

Arora, Kavita Shah; Jacobs, A.

doi:10.1136/medethics-2016-103376

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…Aesthetic and plastic surgeons espouse women's (and girls') right to choose genital surgeries, including labiaplasty, and report client satisfaction after these procedures (Goodman et al 2016;Hardwick-Smith 2011). The potential of therapeutic labiaplasty has also been acknowledged as an approach to curbing non-therapeutic female genital alteration where this is commonly practiced (Arora and Jacobs 2016). Nevertheless, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology [ACOG] (2007[ACOG] ( , 2017 argue against labiaplasty unless medically necessary for adolescent females under 18.…”

Section: Girls' Developing Sexualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning About What’s “Down There”: Body Image Below the Belt and Menstrual Education

Stubbs

Sterling

2020

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies

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Stubbs and Sterling begin this chapter by discussing pubescent girls’ negative attitudes about their bodies ‘below the belt’ within the context of preparation for menstruation during pubertal education. As menstrual education presents mostly negative expectations for girls, the authors argue that it is a key contributor to girls’ negative attitudes about ‘down there.’ Instead, Stubbs and Sterling offer that menstrual education is a valuable opportunity to provide girls with a more accurate, positive, and embodied view of their genitals to access as they develop a sexual sense of themselves. The authors conclude with suggestions for improving this avenue of learning about ‘down there.’

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Section: Girls' Developing Sexualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning About What’s “Down There”: Body Image Below the Belt and Menstrual Education

Stubbs

Sterling

2020

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies

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Complexities of biomedicine, theology and politics in Islamic bioethical deliberation over female genital procedures: a reply to ‘The prosecution of Dawoodi Bohra women’ by Richard Shweder

Padela

2022

Global Discourse

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Professor Richard Shweder’s target article, ‘The prosecution of Dawoodi Bohra women: some reasonable doubts’, lays bare the ways in which political motivations influence moral, ethical and legal deliberations over female genital cutting/circumcision in society. He argues that activist stakeholders deploy a provocative lexicon and biased clinical data in order to silence dissenting views about, and legally restrict the practice of, female genital cutting/ circumcision. He suggests that a more balanced approach to discourse and more nuanced data analysis would open up avenues for tolerating religiously motivated female genital procedures carried out among Dawoodi Bohra communities residing in liberal democracies. Building upon his sociocultural analysis, this reply will explore the confluence of biomedical, theological and political considerations influencing contemporary Islamic bioethical discussion over the practice. I use my participation in the 2017–19 Fiqh Council of North America’s deliberations over female genital cutting to explore how (1) biomedical understandings and health outcomes data, (2) theological concerns over scriptural evidence and juridical best practices, and (3) political and social considerations influenced religious evaluation of the practice. I contend that Islamic juridical academies pursuing bioethical deliberation are not (and should not consider themselves to be) engaging in the routine application of scriptural reasoning in order to furnish guidance to a Muslim polity; rather, bioethics questions are necessarily layered with social and political considerations that require focused examination. This added dimensionality underscores the need for Islamic bioethics deliberation to move beyond the dyad of clinicians and jurists, and to include social scientists, public policy experts and other relevant scholars in order to properly conceive of and address the ethical problem space. Moreover, in the case of female genital cutting/circumcision, the bioethics veers towards biopolitics, making multidisciplinary deliberation all the more important in both religious and secular spaces. Key messages <ul><li>Female genital cutting/circumcision is a practice that has biomedical, social and religious dimensions.</li> <li>Moral, ethical, legal and political deliberation over female genital cutting/circumcision should account for the contentions and ambiguities over each of these dimensions of female genital cutting/circumcision.</li> <li>Islamic bioethical deliberation is more than just scriptural hermeneutics and searching for legal precedent; rather, it involves characterising the problem space along its biomedical, theological, social and political dimensions.</li> <li>Multidisciplinary approaches must therefore be used to accurately describe and address the ethical problem space that female genital cutting/circumcision occupies in both religious and secular contexts.</li></ul>

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The Problem of Female Genital Cutting: Bridging Secular and Islamic Bioethical Perspectives

Duivenbode¹,

Padela²

2019

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

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Harm reduction and female genital alteration: a response to the commentaries

Cited by 3 publications

References 3 publications

Learning About What’s “Down There”: Body Image Below the Belt and Menstrual Education

Learning About What’s “Down There”: Body Image Below the Belt and Menstrual Education

Complexities of biomedicine, theology and politics in Islamic bioethical deliberation over female genital procedures: a reply to ‘The prosecution of Dawoodi Bohra women’ by Richard Shweder

The Problem of Female Genital Cutting: Bridging Secular and Islamic Bioethical Perspectives

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