The focus of this chapter is consent. Consent concerns the granting or withholding of permission to receive care. It may seem surprising that Ping Le would let a surgeon operate on her without wanting to know exactly what is going to happen to her, but some people do occasionally respond in this way – for example, when they can no longer tolerate a painful condition. But is this acceptable from a legal point of view? What if Ping Le had a mental health condition that affected her ability to understand the surgery being proposed? Who could consent for her in that case? This chapter addresses the legal requirements of consent for adults and children, and looks at the place of guardianship and advocacy in decision-making. It also considers the situation of people who are not mentally competent and may require emergency care or need to be restrained against their will.

In the Middle Ages, the dismemberment of Agrippina, Emperor Nero’s mother, was not simply a gruesome family affair, but it had links to the emerging practice of dissection and the anatomical difference between the sexes. According to classical authors, after an unsuccessful assassination attempt involving a self-sinking boat, Agrippina was slayed by Anicetus upon Nero’s orders.1 In Roman History, Cassius Dio added that Agrippina opened her dress and asked Anicetus to strike at her womb “for this bore Nero.”2 Nero wished to see her corpse to verify the death, “so he laid bare her body, looked her all over and inspected her wounds.”3 The emperor examining the wound of the womb is transformed in the Middle Ages into the image of the ruler ordering the dissection of the female body.4 Jacobus de Voragine described such episode in the Golden Legend (c. 1260).5 Jean de Meun, in his continuation to The Romance of the Rose (c. 1275), wrote that Nero “had his mother dismembered so that he might see the place where he was conceived.”6 Jean de Meun is documented between 1265 and 1269 in Bologna, where post-mortem medical examination was practiced from the thirteenth century onward.7 Giovanni Boccaccio reports the story at length, including the wound of the womb, and mentions that in some sources “after her death Nero inspected the corpse, criticizing some parts of her body and praising others.”8

A copy of the Ancient History until Caesar today in the Vatican includes an early depiction of the Rape of the Sabine Women, a violent event from the early history of Rome (more on this in Section 6.2).1 It was probably produced in Genoa or Naples around 1300. The scene is placed in front of a classicizing colonnade with slender columns and depressed arches, potentially an allusion to the antique historical setting. The imagery is minimalist and remains two-dimensional, and compositional decisions limit the exposition of gender-related violence. Altogether there are five pairs of women and men equally distributed under the arches of the colonnade (Figure 6.1). The coifs, hats, and robes of men, together with the circlets and dresses of women, transposes the event into an aristocratic–patrician milieu: We witness what noblemen do to noblewomen. The image has a strong symmetrical structure: The same compositions are repeated on the sides, around the central image. There appears to be a sort of amplification of the gestures. On the flanks, the Roman aggressor embraces the shoulders of the Sabine victim and perhaps touches her breasts. The women here raise their arms with the palms turned towards the outside, which may indicate acceptance.2 One would even be tempted to say that they smile – the approach is welcomed. Quite the opposite, in the inner couplets the men clearly hold the women’s wrists, which signals coercion and use of force. In the center the female victim is embraced, the hands of Romulus (?), with a golden hat, rest on her back and caress her chin. She does not reciprocate the gesture, and this may express her rejection of the imposed intimacy. In any case, the image shows a mixture of negative and positive reactions to the abduction. It displays the major question of the illustrations that accompany romances: Whether or not the female protagonists consented to their capture and the ensuing sexual intercourse? The stories of Helen of Troy, the Sabine women, or Lucretia all revolve around this central issue. Produced primarily for the aristocratic and financial elite in Italy, these French texts and their imagery provide an important backdrop to the communal condemnation of sexual violence and point toward the emergence of erotized representation after 1400.

Chapter 1 treats the War of the Morea as a major media event that sheds new light on the relationship between communication and power in seventeenth-century Venice. Challenging the exceptionalist assumption that secrecy was the guiding principle of official policy, wartime culture reveals an active willingness to deploy publicity to boost government reputation and bolster the Republic’s declining ruling class. In considering different information modalities – oral, manuscript, print, ritual – the chapter approaches news as a form of discourse that integrates facts, emotions, and interpretations. As Walter Benjamin noted, news reporting always comes with explanation, a ‘psychological connection’ that is ‘forced on the reader’. Rather than limit the scope of analysis to the mechanics of communication, the chapter critically examines how war news integrated fact and value to justify military action abroad and encourage popular engagement with empire at home.

What is international law, and how is it different from domestic (national) law?  This chapter provides an answer to those questions and introduces other foundational concepts in international law such as opinio juris, sovereignty, and the state. We trace the development of international law from Western/European perspectives and discuss how international law was often experienced as oppression and violence in the non-Western world. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the classic sources of international law: customs, treaties, general principles of law, judicial decisions, and scholarly writings, each of which is presented in some detail.

Family building is seldom a straight-line march to the finish, even for those fortunate individuals who avoid a detour into the ethical and legal minefield of assisted reproductive technology (ART). Importantly, intended parents and their third-party helpers often lack fundamental information about the parties’ status to any child created – who is a parent, what rights the respective parties possess, and how those rights are protected. Unless appropriately addressed, these issues may contribute to misunderstandings, misperceptions, and confusion, all of which may be laid at the feet of the fertility counselor. In order to practice preemptive crisis management, fertility counselors must recognize risky situations, analyze them with a critical eye, practice within the parameters of competence, ethics, and legal sound stricture, and apply best practice principles. Collaboration with qualified legal practitioners who understand third-party reproduction law is essential to that end.

This chapter introduces the book by providing some background and context to the medico-legal nexus for treatment of trans youth with gender dysphoria in Australia, England and Wales. The guiding research questions for the book are outlined, followed by the structure of chapters. The chapter descriptions are interwoven with the relevant methods employed to examine the law in the relevant jurisdictions. Lastly, the scope and limitations of the book are noted to guide future researchers in this area.

This chapter examines the Australian law governing consent to medical treatment for trans adolescents. This is contextualised first, by critically examining the general principles in respect of consent to medical treatment by and for young people in Australia. The actors involved in consent processes, young people, their parents and courts, are outlined with respect to the scope and limitations on their power. Notably, this includes discussion of the landmark decision of the High Court in Marion’s Case, alongside further cases that developed and applied the legal principles from that case. Significantly, the chapter presents an account of the key Australian case law relating to the treatment of gender dysphoria in adolescence. It will be shown that, while some legal barriers have been removed by case law, those that remain are troubling. It is argued that the Australian case law in this area is incoherent, inconsistent and ultimately fails to achieve its aims to safeguard the health and wellbeing of trans young people and their right to exercise bodily autonomy.

This chapter concludes the book by charting a path forward for law reform. Suggestions for reform of the significantly more burdensome legal framework in Australia, as opposed to England and Wales, are presented. Throughout this book is a plea for the law to support, rather than impede, trans young people’s gender expression and bodily autonomy.

This chapter examines the law in England and Wales governing consent to medical treatment for trans children and adolescents. First, the general legal principles governing consent to children’s medical treatment in England and Wales are detailed. In doing so, the various avenues to consent for children’s medical treatment in England and Wales are laid out. Second, it will be seen that, historically, there has been limited guidance from case law on the situation of trans young people; however, this was altered with the landmark 2020 decision of the High Court in Bell v Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust and subsequent appeal. Key changes to the law in respect of trans youth’s ability to seek medical treatment as a result of these judgements are analysed. Finally, the law is synthesised as to what represent the current legal principles applicable to trans youth seeking medical treatment in England in Wales.

This introductory chapter briefly outlines the main theme of this volume, namely, to review the new opportunities and risks of digital healthcare from various disciplinary perspectives. These perspectives include law, public policy, organisational studies, and applied ethics. Based on this interdisciplinary approach, we hope that effective strategies may arise to ensure that benefits of this ongoing revolution are deployed in a responsible and sustainable manner. The second part of the chapter comprises a brief review of the four parts and fourteen substantive chapters that make up this volume.

Sharing one’s health data with one’s doctor can be an important factor in improving one’s own health, and sharing the data for scientific research can help improve the everyone’s health. At the same time, health data is highly confidential, so the sharing process must provide sufficient control over one’s privacy. Legally, sharing is often based on consent, which theoretically affords extensive individual control, but in practice often requires processing complicated information. Therefore, the way the consenting process is implemented plays a significant role in either hindering or helping the individual. This chapter explores how individuals’ ability to make informed consent decisions can be simplified by utilising AI-based recommendations with the consent intermediary approach and by making the consenting decisions in the context of utilising the health data thus making the individuals more aware of the data they are sharing.

The emergence of Facebook’s suicide prevention algorithm has prompted discussion around whether social media platforms have a role to play in public health surveillance. Concerns have been raised about an entity that is not a public interest health authority collecting and acting on the private health information of its users, particularly sensitive data like an individual’s mental health status. Mental illnesses are still heavily stigmatised, despite continued efforts to normalise these conditions in some regions of the world. Depending on a user’s geographic location, the ramifications of the suicide detection algorithms generating false positives for suicide risk could have severe consequences. The present chapter continues this discourse by examining the ethical implications of Facebook’s suicide prevention algorithm from the privacy, legal, and cultural perspectives.

The provision and practice of healthcare is subject to a broad legal framework of accountability. Healthcare professionals must develop a sound understanding of their legal responsibilities and the underpinning ethical, professional and legal reasons for them. Ultimately, healthcare law is about people, their bodies, and those entrusted to care for them. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to rationalise and offer insight into the link between legal accountability and quality of patient care. This chapter has been written to support all perioperative practitioners in developing their legal knowledge in the context of the operating theatre.

Inevitably, when we criminalize care, we affect far more than just the road to any particular program or support. Chapters 6 and 7 focused on those roads, describing how rules, practices, and bias draw women and families out of care systems into punishment systems and how the locations of care inside punishment systems draws them further in. In this chapter, the focus turns from the road to care to the end of that road, to the care itself. It asks and, in the context of this study, answers, a fundamental question: What happens to care itself when care is criminalized? As we learned in Chapter 3, care for those who we stigmatize, for those who we deem worthy of surveillance and punishment, for those who we are willing to label “criminal,” is all too often substantively different than the care we provide for everyone else.