Medically Unnecessary Genital Cutting and the Rights of the Child : Moving Toward Consensus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Brussels Collaboration on Bodily IntegrityWhat are the ethics of child genital cutting?In a recent issue of the journal, Duivenbode and Padela (2019) called for a renewed discussion of this question.Noting that modern healthcare systems "serve individuals with a wide array of preferences about how their bodies should look and function," they asked how physicians and policymakers should respond to requests for procedures "that may be rooted in cultural or religious values, or perhaps social preference rather than good medical practice" (p.4).The impetus for their paper was a recent high-profile U.S. federal court case-the first to test the 1996 American law prohibiting "female genital mutilation" (FGM).Legally, this refers to the intentional cutting or sewing of "the whole or any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years."No allowance is made for what the law calls "custom or ritual."The sole exception is for medical necessity. 1 We do not take a position on the legal merits of this sole exception.Instead, we seek to clarify and assess the underlying moral reasons for opposing all medically unnecessary genital cutting 2 of female minors, no matter how severe.We find that within a Western 1 18 U.S. Code 116.Female genital mutilation: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/116.A second exception is listed for certain obstetric procedures carried out by a licensed practitioner in connection with childbirth; however, conceptually, these fall under the same definition of medical necessity employed in Box 1. Note: we do not assume that the capacity to provide ethically valid consent to medically unnecessary genital cutting is necessarily tied to the age of legal majority, such as 18 in the federal statute.In some cases, persons under the age 18 may have sufficient maturity to make an adequately informed decision about whether to undergo a given body modification that may not be strictly medically necessary (see Murphy 2019).We will not enter into the philosophical debate about the precise conditions under which a legal minor can provide ethically valid consent to various procedures.However, the developing autonomy of young people is an important factor and we affirm that their considered preferences and values about their bodies should be taken seriously at any age. 2 We will follow Duivenbode and Padela (2019) in using the term "genital cutting" rather than "genital mutilation" to refer to the diverse set of practices described in Box 2, apart from our reference to the U.S. legal term and to the World Health Organization typology where applicable.For detailed discussions about this choice in terminology and the relevant background issues, see, e.g.,
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".