Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-5nwft Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-01T02:57:32.265Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

28 - The Right to Bodily Integrity

Cutting Away Rhetoric in Favour of Substance

from The Right to Bodily Integrity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2020

Andreas von Arnauld
Affiliation:
Christian-Albrechts Universität zu Kiel, Germany
Kerstin von der Decken
Affiliation:
Christian-Albrechts Universität zu Kiel, Germany
Mart Susi
Affiliation:
Tallinn University, Estonia
Get access

Summary

What we should be able to do to our own bodies and the bodies of our loved ones is at the heart of many questions tackled by medicine, law and social policy. A central aspect of these questions concerning the body revolves around maintaining its physical integrity. It is widely held that preserving the physical integrity of the body is inherently valuable and that transgressing this integrity represents a distinctive form of wrongdoing. Indeed, some have argued that physical integrity is so important that we should have a right to bodily integrity (RBI). This chapter seeks to examine the nature and implications of such a right. In the first section I provide a brief overview of and legal pedigree for the RBI – concentrating primarily on human rights sources and discourse around protections of the physical integrity of the human body. In the second section I flesh out and develop some of the central conceptual underpinnings of the notion of bodily integrity and normative implications of how the RBI has been understood and interpreted within the literature, legal doctrine and public policy. In the third section I explore what is new with the RBI – in particular the development of a specified, derivative right to genital integrity and claims that such a right would entail that a commonly practised medical procedure would constitute a human rights violation.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of New Human Rights
Recognition, Novelty, Rhetoric
, pp. 363 - 377
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×