Many countries, Sweden among
them, lack professional guidelines and established procedures for responding to
young females requesting virginity certificates or hymen restoration due to
honour-related threats.
The purpose of the present survey study was to further
examine the attitudes of the Swedish healthcare professionals concerned towards
young females requesting virginity certificates or hymen restorations. The
study indicates that a small majority of Swedish general practitioners and
gynaecologists would accommodate these patients, at least given certain
circumstances. But a large minority of physicians would under no circumstances
help the young females, regardless of speciality, years of practice within
medicine, gender, or experience of the phenomenon. Their responses are similar
to other areas where it has been claimed that society should adopt a zero
tolerance policy against certain phenomena, for instance drug policy, where it
has also been argued that society should never act in ways that express support
for the practice in question. However, this argument is questionable.
A more
pragmatic approach would also allow for follow-ups and evaluation of virginity
certificates and hymen restorations, as is demonstrated by the Dutch policy.
Hence, there are some obvious advantages to this pragmatic approach compared to
the restrictive one espoused by a large minority of Swedish physicians and
Swedish policy-makers in this area.
Full article at: http://goo.gl/F8uupm
- 1Stockholm Centre for Healthcare Ethics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
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