ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses two specific challenges to bioethics within the globalisation process: female circumcision, and the role of health care personnel in fertility reduction. Bioethics has drawn on liberal models of the human person that emphasize individual autonomy, and therefore forbid virtually all forms of coercion. Integration of social and cultural variables into clinical bioethics will be strenuously opposed by many who insist that an effective and workable code of professional ethics must not rely on individual judgment, but must have some type of universal standards external to the individual in order to prevent xenophobic prejudice. The danger of entrusting such policy to a newly created class of medical technicians with no previous sense of professional identity, solidarity or ethics is substantial. Ethics is most often a matter of choosing the most appropriate, responsible option from among those available.
