Bodily autonomy is a right granted to every person to have the right to control what are the things to be or not done to their own bodies. When each person has full bodily autonomy, they’re not only empowered to decide things when it comes to their health and future – without constraints or any control by other people – they also have the support and resources that are needed to eloquently carry out all the decisions they would make.

Positive Women’s Network – the concept in which bodily autonomy is centered upon. This is the United States’ vision of a world wherein every woman and girl with HIV can experience healthy, long, dignified, and productive lives, free from any discrimination, stigma, and violence in any form. 

In this period of continuously expanding political constraint and surveillance, hate-fueled violence, and endeavors to additional confine reproductive rights and opportunity of development, the central privileges should be declared, everything being equal, and specifically for ladies and people of trans experience living with HIV, to have full control of their own bodies as well as their futures.

At the point when ladies and young girls living with HIV are free, everyone will be free as well.

For a hundred years, sexuality, bodies, reproduction, movement of women of color have been policed and controlled in the US context, frequently brutally and at an extraordinary expense to privileges. 

Today, for ladies and young girls living with HIV, who are principally from communities of color, misogyny, HIV stigma, transphobia, and racism converge to amplify attacks on their privileges from all fronts. 

However, we realize that our common liberties ought to never be adapted on race, HIV status, sex, ethnicity, gender expression or identity, or some other part of what our identity is. 

The principle of bodily integrity summarizes the privilege of every individual, including children, to independence and self-assurance over their own body. To put it simply, the only person with the option to make a decision about their body is them—nobody else should be involved.

Practices which disregard an individual’s bodily integrity are wide-running, from apparently innocuous acts like piercing a baby girl’s ears to types of violence like sexual abuse, or even to medical treatment regulated without a patient’s assent or that are all against their wishes. 

Children — commonly affected by violations of bodily integrity. On the grounds that these harmful practices are generally performed on individuals at an exceptionally young age, when they aren’t able to support and protect themselves, or give — or deny — assent. 

Of specific concern are the practices that appreciate larger part backing or detachment inside the nations in which they’re drilled. These are the hardest to uncover and open as harmful to children since it would involve upsetting the status quo. Probably the most abhorrent violations of children’s bodily integrity recently — which are still generally maintained in practicing communities — are those completed for medical reasons on the most sensitive and private part of the human body which is the genitals.

These may be incorporated forced sex assignment of intersex children, female genital mutilation, routine male circumcision, and coerced or forced sterilization of children with disabilities.

Such practices can have well-being related aftermaths going from disease and scarring to deformation, amputation, and sadly, even demise. Their effect likewise goes past the physical, as the practices encroach children’s civil rights too, including their freedom of thought and opinion as to the form of assent or its for refusal. In situations where the practice is based on adults’ or is completed to adjust to social expectations — not the young individual’s — religion, culture, or custom, it also sums to violating the civil rights of the children.

Except for female genital mutilation—which is precisely one of the most generally perceived and tested harmful traditional practices — the other three traditions likewise include irreversibly modifying children’s private part through a medical procedure for no legitimate medical explanation and without their assent, yet all remain lawful in many countries around the globe when performed on kids and appreciate greater part uphold in the nations where they’re being practiced.

Routine male circumcision

Male circumcision is an irreversible procedure being done to precisely eliminate the foreskin from the human penis. It’s regularly being done on babies and even adults within the communities of Jewish and Muslim, separately; on newborn babies out of social convection among non-strict networks in some Western nations, most eminently the United States; and on young men as a soul-changing experience inside some ethnic gatherings in parts of Africa. 

When performed for cultural or religious aspects — not any form of medical — reasons, it straight assigns routine circumcision as therapeutically unjustifiable. Indeed, there’s developing help inside the clinical network against male circumcision as standard practice since its non-remedial premise implies it doesn’t consent to clinical medical ethics.

To sum up, routine male circumcision includes the removal of healthy tissue for no medical explanation from one of the most sensitive body parts, superfluously presenting a child to the dangers of medical procedure, and typically happens at an age when they come up short on the ability to assent or deny assent. 

Panic attacks, bleeding, disfigurement,  infection, amputation and necrosis, and even death — recorded complications of circumcision. Exposing the children to such kinds of dangers without rehabilitative or curative justification conflicts with medical ethics, just as parental obligations to protect the children from injury and any form of harm or danger. 

For every one of these reasons, the practice has likewise alluded to male genital mutilation.

Intersex children undergone medical procedure for sex assignment 

Intersex individuals are brought into the world with anatomical attributes that don’t match what’s ordinarily viewed as either male or female, with the medical procedure once in a while performed on intersex infants to change their private part so they show up more male or female. 

This changing of sex procedure, which is done at an age when the patient is too young to even consider giving consent or declining assent, did not depend on medical need, however,  based only on the paternalistic assumption that it what they considered as better — and simpler — for a child to be raised from birth either as a young lady or lad.

This practice dismisses the likelihood that the ‘assigned’ sex may not be confirmed with a child’s sex way of life as they are getting older. 

Other than this, the procedure superfluously uncovered an intersex child to the possible permanent consequences as well as the dangers of medical procedure, including lack of sexual sensation, incontinence, scarring, and infertility.

What’s more, the surgery amounts to forced sterilization when the ovaries or testes are being taken out.

Other recorded results are psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with intersex grown-ups saying they believe they were mutilated and mistreated. 

Children with learning disabilities force to sterilization

Sterilization is a medical procedure conducted to leave an individual permanently incapable to reproduce. Constrained sterilization happens when the medical procedure is being done without the knowledge of an affected person, without their given assent, or against their express free will not being sterilized. 

A person with learning disabilities, including Down’s syndrome as well as autism, is persuasively sterilized everywhere in the world depending on doctors’ suggestions and with the assent of guardians or patients. 

The said practice isn’t exceptional to children, however in reality there are still many affected, particularly young ladies.