Reproductive health and violations of the human right to body integrity

<p><strong>Background</strong>. The article analyses the current practice of violating the right to bodily integrity, focuses on the international and European regulation of the problem, the policies of the WHO and other international institutions, and indicates the policy of discrimination on the basis of age and gender inequality in the reproductive sphere.<br><strong>Objective of the review</strong>: to study the medical and non-medical practice of implementing and protecting the human right to bodily integrity through the study of the problem of legal protection against female genital mutilation and male circumcision.<br><strong>Materials and methods</strong>. The authors have chosen an intercomplementary methodological approach, which allows a social phenomenon of a medical nature to be considered through the prism of a somatic problem, medical harm, doctor’s orders, as well as from other social points of view in combination with legal, social, cultural and moral factors. To systematize legal regulation, the grouping method is distinguished, and the method of axiological idealism is used to understand the humanistic direction of legal policy in the field of reproductive and sexual human rights, to determine the value determinants of legal reality in modern society and to search for optimal possibilities of the legal system in this field.<br><strong>Analysis of literary data</strong>. The article examines the legal ideology in the field of protection of the right to physicality in the reproductive sphere, conducts a comprehensive analysis of the practice of female genital mutilation and presents a representative analysis of male circumcision as a controversial method of medical intervention.<br><strong>Conclusions</strong>. Based on the analysis of regulatory legal acts of the international and European level, individual national practices, and positions of medical associations, we note that at the current stage of development of legal ideology in the field of medical law, the WHO approach does not meet modern legal requirements for combating torture, the legal interpretation of the human right to autonomy in the field of treatment, the value of childhood and non-discrimination on the basis of age.</p>