Children's bioethics: The international bio-political discourse on harmful traditional practices and the right of the child to cultural identity .

摘要

This dissertation examines the international discourse on children's bioethics with respect to the child's right to cultural identity. It focuses on various traditional medical and bodily practices and recently-invented ones that are performed on children for religio-cultural reasons. It explores these practices as an essential ingredient of the construct of the group and of the child's cultural identity and places them in the broader political and legal discourses on international human rights and bioethics.; The study observes how acceptable and deplorable biomedical customs are conceptualized within these discourses and configured into the diverse constructs of bioethics. Building on scholarly literature on the politics of identity, culture and participatory citizenship under the international human rights regime, I analyze the relationship between bioethics, religio-cultural bodily practices and children's rights to identity, and further develop notions of children as social and political agents in a multicultural world.; This work proposes a framework for the evaluation of biomedical practices that are carried out on children. It suggests that for a comprehensive discourse on children's bioethics, the social and anthropological nexus of the child must be taken into account. It advances the argument that children's bioethical rights under international human rights law must incorporate the child's right to identity, and reconceptualizes what this right means. It puts forward several medical and identity-related factors as the basis for determining whether a biomedical practice should be permitted thus to allow for the child's voice to be heard.