Arianne Shahvisi

Brighton and Sussex Medical School | BSMS · Ethics

This Special Collection of articles in Culture, Health & Sexuality examines diverse genital cutting practices affecting individuals of all sexes and genders across cultures. It challenges dominant narratives and stereotypes, particularly in relation to male circumcision and what the World Health Organisation (WHO) defines as “female genital mutilat...

The distinction between "medicalised female genital mutilation (FGM)" as defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and "female genital cosmetic surgery" (FGCS) is unclear, particularly given the lack of an age distinction or consent criterion in the WHO definition. In practice, the former term is applied exclusively to practices performed prim...

Socially responsible publishers, such as the BMJ, have demonstrated a commitment to health equity and working toward rectifying the structural racism that exists both in health care and in medical publishing.(1) The commitment of academic publishers to collecting information relevant to promoting equity and diversity is important and commendable wh...

In this article, I argue that the moral and legal distinction between “female genital cutting” and “female genital cosmetic surgeries” cannot be maintained without recourse to racist distinctions between the consent capacities of white women and women of colour. The physical procedures involved in these surgeries have significant overlap, as do the...

Campaigns to circumcise millions of boys and men to reduce HIV transmission are being conducted throughout eastern and southern Africa, recommended by the World Health Organization and implemented by the United States government and Western NGOs. In the United States, proposals to mass-circumcise African and African American men are long standing,...

The American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM), American Society for Pain Management Nursing (ASPMN), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and other largely U.S.-based medical organizations have argued that at least some forms of non-therapeutic child genital cutting, including routine penile circumcision, are ethically permissible even when perfor...

Conflicting evidence regarding risk compensation following medical male circumcision calls for careful contextual research, not generalized scale up

In recent years, the removal of monuments which glorify historical figures associated with racism and colonialism has become one of the most visible and contested forms of decolonisation. Yet many have objected that there is educational value in leaving such monuments standing. In this paper, I argue that public monuments can be understood as speec...

Objectives Socioeconomic factors such as elevated incidence of chronic disease, overcrowding, and increased occupational exposure result in higher risk of infectious disease. The COVID-19 pandemic has appeared to disproportionately affect communities affected by deprivation and discrimination, who also appear to be at greater risk of severe disease...

We read with interest the recent article by Morris, ostensibly commenting on new research published in this journal showing durable effects of voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) for HIV prevention in Rakai, Uganda, but also devoting considerable length to critiquing an unrelated paper of ours that was published in Developing World Bioethics...

In this paper I explore a method for refusing uptake when explanations are morally and epistemically troubling. Gaile Pohlhaus Jr (2011) has shown that imploring marginalised people to “understand” marginalising practices amounts to a request that they legitimise their own marginalisation. In this paper, I expand upon this analysis with the aim of...

The Global Gag Rule is a United States policy that blocks global health funding to foreign non-governmental organisations if they engage in abortion-related activities. It has been implemented by every Republican administration since 1984 and remains in operation at the time of writing in its most stringent and extensive form. It has been criticise...

Many healthcare goods, such as surgical instruments, textiles and gloves, are manufactured in unregulated factories and sweatshops where, amongst other labour rights violations, workers are subject to considerable occupational health risks. In this paper we undertake an ethical analysis of the supply of sweatshop-produced surgical goods to healthca...

Infants born to those resident in a particular state are generally granted automatic citizenship, which in most Global North states confers a range of privileges, and may therefore be seen as the untaxed inheritance of lifelong access to valuable resources. In this article I contend, via two arguments, that all refugees should also be granted autom...

In this paper, I argue that men should take primary responsibility for protecting against pregnancy. Male long-acting reversible contraceptives are currently in development, and, once approved, should be used as the standard method for avoiding pregnancy. Since women assume the risk of pregnancy when they engage in penis-in-vagina sex, men should d...

Nesting is a hormonally-determined set of behaviours, observed in some animals, relating to the preparation of the space in which the offspring will be born and raised. Texts on childbirth and pregnancy advise women that they will experience nesting behaviours during pregnancy, causing them to tidy, clean, and prepare their living space. In this pa...

Welcome to Issue 2 of the University of Brighton’s journal offering a wide variety of articles with teaching and learning approaches and critical theoretical provocations for decolonising the curriculum. We begin by celebrating the university achieving a Bronze Award from Advance HE’s highly regarded Race Equality Charter. Momtaz Rahman explains...

The aim of this paper is to debunk the assertion that miraculous “conspiracies” between fundamental particles are required to bring about the projectibility of special science generalisations. Albert and Loewer have proposed a theory of lawhood which supplements the Best System of fundamental laws with a statistical postulate over the initial condi...

We seek to clarify and assess the underlying moral reasons for opposing all medically unnecessary genital cutting of female minors, no matter how severe. We find that within a Western medicolegal framework, these reasons are compelling. However, they do not only apply to female minors, but rather to non-consenting persons of any age irrespective of...

During the “age of austerity” the UK government has progressively limited free health services for “overseas visitors” on the grounds of fairness and frugality. This is despite the fact that the cost of the additional bureaucracy required by the new system and the public health consequences are expected to exceed the sums saved. In this article I e...

Pregnancy care is chargeable for migrants who do not have indefinite leave to remain in the UK. Women who are not ‘ordinarily resident’, including prospective asylum applicants, some refused asylum-seekers, unidentified victims of trafficking and undocumented people are required to pay substantial charges in order to access antenatal, intrapartum a...

In this chapter, we contrast legal and ethical perspectives on two forms of nontherapeutic female genital cutting: those commonly known as “female genital mutilation” and those commonly known as “female genital cosmetic surgeries.” We begin by questioning the usefulness of these categories—and the presumed distinctions upon which they rest— stressi...

Neglected tropical diseases are defined operationally as diseases that prevail in "tropical" regions and are under-researched, under-funded, and under-treated compared with their disease burden. By analysing the adjectives "tropical" and "neglected," I expose and interrogate the discourses within which the term "neglected tropical disease" derives...

Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery - edited by Sarah M. Creighton February 2019

An analysis of the cultural and economic drivers of the growing phenomenon of FGCS, written by cross-disciplinary experts, this book challenges the concept of individual consumer choice in FGCS: A decision that is rarely exercised in a socio-cultural vacuum. Four distinct aspects of FGCS are covered: Variations in female genital anatomy; surgical t...

Women are over-represented within alternative medicine, both as consumers and as service providers. In this paper, I show that the appeal of alternative medicine to women relates to the neglect of women’s health needs within scientific medicine. This is concerning because alternative medicine is severely limited in its therapeutic effects; therefor...

Women have been central to the revolution in Rojava, leading to widespread interest in the Kurdish women’s movement across Western contexts. Yet Western mass media representations of women combatants tend to be objectifying and superficial, glossing over the unique variety of feminism, known as “jineology,” that is core to the political system of R...

The Global Gag Rule has restricted access to reproductive health services across the Global South for over three decades. In 2017, Trump dramatically expanded the policy, further reducing the number of women with access to safe abortions. In this paper, I argue that Global North economic policies have left Global South people dependent on aid in or...

Podoconiosis is a debilitating chronic swelling of the foot and lower leg caused by long-term exposure to irritant red volcanic clay soil in the highland regions of Africa, Central America, and India. In this paper, we consider the human rights violations that cause, and are caused by, podoconiosis in Ethiopia. Specifically, we discuss the way in w...

This paper argues that conceiving of paid domestic labour as ordinary work constitutes a hermeneutical injustice against domestic workers, whose work differs from other occupations in morally significant ways. Amongst other distinctive properties, outsourced domestic work inevitably rests on gendered and racialised asymmetries of wealth and social...

The most benign rationale for sex selection is deemed to be “family balancing.” On this view, provided the sex distribution of an existing offspring group is “unbalanced,” one may legitimately use reproductive technologies to select the sex of the next child. I present four novel concerns with granting “family balancing” as a justification for sex...

In this paper, I argue that the conscience clause around abortion provision in England, Scotland and Wales is inadequate for two reasons. First, the patient and doctor are differently situated with respect to social power. Doctors occupy a position of significant moral and epistemic authority with respect to their patients, who are vulnerable and r...

A UK doctor was recently acquitted of charges of reinstating a variety of female genital mutilation after delivering a child. In this paper, I contend that this incident reflects a broader confusion concerning the ethico-legal status of non-therapeutic genital surgeries for children and adults, which are not derivable from tenets of medical ethics,...

The U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) is critically reliant on staff from overseas, which means that a sizeable number of U.K. healthcare professionals have received their training at the cost of other states, whose populations are urgently in need of healthcare professionals. At the same time, while healthcare is widely seen as a primary good,...

The demand for informed consent in clinical medicine is usually justified on the basis that it promotes patient autonomy. In this article I argue that the most effective way to promote autonomy is to improve patient understanding in order to reduce the epistemic disparity between patient and medical professional. Informed consent therefore derives...

Gender and Global Justice. By Alison Jaggar. Polity Press, 2014, pp. 288, £16.99. ISBN 978-0-7456-6377-7 - Volume 90 Issue 4 - Arianne Shahvisi

We present the use of optical fibers to form a counter-propagating optical trap as a means of manipulating both solid and liquid aerosols. We explore the use of single and multimode fibers to achieve trapping of various particles in air, present the trapping properties of the different fiber types and compare the observed trends to those predicted...

We discuss the application of optical trapping techniques to droplets, both in air (aerosols) and in fluid (emulsions). We show the holographic optical manipulation of aerosols and how this can be used to transfer orbital angular momentum to airborne particles. We demonstrate new types of traps for aerosols in the form of dual beam fibre traps and...