"Shaping Children, Shaping Lives: Parental Authority and the Child's Future"

Focusing mainly on permanent body alterations, this talk will consider the scope of parental authority in relation to shaping a child’s future life. In the bioethics literature, these kind of questions are most often addressed using arguments about a child’s right to an open future. I will argue that this is a misguided approach and, instead, we should use a combination of care theory and virtue theory to consider these questions.