This book deepens our understanding of the social, legal, and anthropological issues that arise from the global proliferation of advanced biomedical technologies and how they enable people to use their bodies to express individual and collective identities.
This book deepens our understanding of the social, legal, and anthropological issues that arise from the global proliferation of advanced biomedical technologies and how they enable people to use their bodies to express individual and collective identities. The volume approaches these issues through the lens of three contentious and ethically fraught biomedical techniques: gender surgery; medically assisted reproduction; and organ donation and transplantation. It combines anthropological understandings of the body as a site for claiming and safeguarding identities with perspectives from legal and medical experts to address the bioethical concerns associated with these technologies and to challenge assumptions regarding the universality of normative principles such as personal autonomy, consent, and justice. The two regions that are the focus of this volume – the Middle East and Europe – allow the authors to explore cross-cultural comparisons and what they can tell us about how the symbolic dimension of the body, as a locus of identity, impacts medical practices. This is becoming especially relevant now, as contact among widely diverse cultures and communities is becoming ever more frequent and intense due to increasing migration, rampant urbanization, and internal displacement. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics, and policymakers working in the areas of Legal Anthropology, Comparative Law, Law and Religion, Medical Anthropology, Medical Law and Ethics, and Sociology of Medicine.
Foreword: Toward a Transversal Bioethics: Some Notes on Principles,
Practice, and the Future, Sarah Franklin; Biomedical Technologies at the
Crossroads of Law, Religion, and Culture in Europe and the Middle East, Hagai
Boas, Marie-Claire Foblets, Shai Lavi, and Federica Sona;
1. Is
Medicalization Secular? Regulating Circumcision in Germany, Turkiye, and
Israel, Shai Lavi;
2. Female Genital Mutilation versus Other Forms of Female
Genital Practices in Malta and the UK: Exploring Shifts in Legal and
Biomedical Perceptions, Jeanise Dalli;
3. Global, Ethical, Cultural, and
Religious Perspectives on Human Reproduction, Gamal I. Serour;
4. Balancing
the Rights of Unborn Children and Intended Parents: Sensitized Reproductive
Biotechnologies and Islamic Medical Ethics, Federica Sona;
5. The Paradoxical
Role of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Organ Donation in Israel, Hagai Boas;
6.
Consent to Organ Transplantation: Factoring in Religious, Ethical, and
Cultural Diversity, Farrah Raza;
7. Children in Transplantation Who Is to
Decide What?, Jenny Prüfe;
8. Recognizing Birthing Trans Fathers: A Legal
Puzzle at the Intersection of Cultural and Structural Limits, Alice Margaria
and Stefano Osella;
9. Cultural Pluralism, Ethical Beliefs, and Biomedicine
in the Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights, Vladimiro Zagrebelsky.
Federica Sona is Associate Professor in the Law Department, the University of Turin, Italy, Associate Researcher at SOAS University of London, UK, and Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany.
Marie-Claire Foblets is Director of the Department of Law & Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany and Professor of Law at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.
Shai Lavi is Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University, Israel.
Hagai Boas leads the Science, Technology and Society cluster at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
