Biomedical Practices, Religion, and the Law: Perspectives from the Middle East and Europe (Law and Anthropology)

This book deepens our understanding of the social, legal, and anthropological issues that arise from the global proliferation of advanced biomedical technologies and how they enable people to use their bodies to express individual and collective identities.The volume approaches these issues through the lens of three contentious and ethically fraught biomedical techniques: gender surgery; medically assisted reproduction; and organ donation and transplantation.It combines anthropological understandings of the body as a site for claiming and safeguarding identities with perspectives from legal and medical experts to address the bioethical concerns associated with these technologies and to challenge assumptions regarding the universality of normative principles such as personal autonomy, consent, and justice.The two regions that are the focus of this volume - the Middle East and Europe - allow the authors to explore cross-cultural comparisons and what they can tell us about how the symboli