Do you do hymenoplasty? Doctors’ ethical, cultural and social dilemmas when faced with this question
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hymenoplasty is a procedure to surgically restore the hymen, a thin membrane that partially closes the entrance to the vagina and which may be ruptured due to sexual activity. It is requested by women whose culture demands they prove their virginity by bleeding on their wedding night. As a result, this surgery is filled with ethical and legal controversy surrounding virginity, sexual equality, and women's rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination. This paper is a qualitative analysis of conversations with four Canadian doctors faced with the request for hymenoplasty and their experiences and decision-making process. Results indicate doctors relied on values of self-determination, bodily autonomy, honesty and integrity, and ethical principles of informed consent, competence, privacy, confidentiality, and culture and gender awareness, to inform their decision making. In their dialogues they placed different weight on the biological aspects of the surgery, culture, and personal autonomy resulting in different decisions and actions in response to the request. In addition, compartmentalisation, simplification, distance, differentiation and responsiveness appeared to assist the doctors in engaging with the discomfort and ethical dilemmas inherent in responding to the request for hymenoplasty. Future research is needed to verify these results and to explore the impact of the differing approaches to the women requesting the surgery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".