The Right to Bodily Integrity
A. M. Viens
Abstract
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.