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.

What are clinical trials?

Clinical trials are scientific evaluations of medical interventions for the treatment of somatic or psychological conditions that provide an analysis of the quality, safety, and efficacy of particular products, or a method of evaluating two products for their comparative value. While clinical trials are most often used to test therapeutic pharmaceutical products, they can also be utilized to evaluate medical devices or surgical procedures, plus other preventive, screening, detection, and non-pharmacological therapeutic products/methods.

Clinical trials influence clinical practice by providing vital information to clinicians and patients to use in assessing appropriate treatment options. Clinical trials allow for the generation of sound empirical evidence that individuals can use to address important questions concerning the benefits and harms of particular therapies in a scientifically rigorous and ethical way.

You probably faced a clinical issue today with an ethical component. Did you recognize it? Did you know how to address it? Did you have an organized framework? Did you know what to say to the patient and their family? Did you know what to do? Did you feel comfortable and confident in this aspect of your clinical practice? This book seeks to address how greater recognition of ethical issues and their resolution can improve patient care, research practices, and institutional arrangements.

What is bioethics?

Bioethics, while a modern term, is as old as medicine itself. The Code of Hammurabi and the Hippocratic Oath, for instance, include provisions concerning the importance of ethical considerations to clinical practice. In addition to its initial focus on ethical issues relevant to clinical care, bioethics concerns the moral, legal, political, and social issues raised by medicine, biomedical research, and life sciences technologies.

While bioethical considerations will remain a central aspect of medicine, it can do so at different levels. One can distinguish between three broad spheres of bioethics. The first is academic bioethics, a sphere primarily focused on how theoretical and practical aspects of medicine affect considerations such as special obligations or responsibilities of clinicians, what is valuable, good, right, etc. in the biomedical context and how one might go about providing systematic accounts of such considerations.