Alyssa Izatt

When the US Supreme Court rejected the constitutional right to abortion care, several US states enacted bans. This legal change exposed critical moral questions about pregnancy in childhood: What do adults owe to an impregnated girl? This article shows that both opponents of abortion and defenders of women’s rights make a mistake by overlooking that a girl is a child. Her caregivers should view her impregnation as a malady and take steps to terminate it. This article presents a novel analysis of a previously unnamed injustice—antigirlism—to make sense of the mistreatment that girls endure in reproductive care.

Regret colours many areas of our lives, from the vital to the trivial. One example is in medical decision‐making, when physicians hesitate to provide procedures they think their patients will regret. For instance, physicians sometimes refuse younger women's requests for elective sterilization. Hesitating when we believe that we or someone else will regret a decision seems commonsensical: presumably this protects us from making poor choices. But we lack a clear understanding of how regret impacts wellbeing. Before invoking the risk of regret to steer decision‐making, we must scrutinize the widespread aversion to making regrettable choices and the intuition that we fare poorly when we regret. Contrary to the commonsense view that regret should be avoided, this article shows that regret is not prudentially weighty, and we go wrong when we prioritize regret in decision‐making. This article isolates three ways in which something might be prudentially weighty: (1) it harms us; (2) it indicates that a harm has occurred; or (3) it inhibits a benefit. Despite our intuitions, regret is not itself harmful; it does not reliably indicate harm; and it does not preclude benefit. Knowing this enables us to evaluate critically how we currently treat regret in practical contexts.

Tamera Lyons doesn’t experience human beauty. She has been raised with calliagnosia (or “calli”), a technology which prevents her from recognizing whether someone is attractive or unattractive. In “Liking What You See: a Documentary,” Ted Chiang imagines a world in which the perception of human beauty is optional. Some characters in Chiang’s world embrace calli wholeheartedly, viewing the technology as a new frontier for equality and empowerment, and a solution for preventing discrimination and harm based on looks; calli is an “assisted maturity” that allows one to “ignore the surface and look deeper.” Others reject calli, for them, beauty is worth the risk—an encounter with beauty is one of the most joyful human experiences and to give it up is to give up on something rich and wonderful. If it is wrong to enjoy the beauty of others, we can no longer admire the beautiful face of a photograph’s subject, the allure of Mona Lisa’s smile, or the electric appearances of our favorite actors and actresses. So we choose the ability to experience beauty or easy morality? It is one of the world’s great misfortunes that our moral and aesthetic interests appear to be so incompatible.

We address the ethical and legal considerations for elective tubal sterilization in young, nulliparous women in Canada, with comparison with the United States and the United Kingdom. Professional guidelines recommend that age and parity should not be obstacles for receiving elective permanent contraception; however, many physicians hesitate to provide this procedure to young women because of the permanence of the procedure and the speculative possibility of regret. At the practice level, this means that there are barriers for young women to access elective sterilization; they are questioned or not taken seriously, or their desire for sterilization is more generally belittled by health care professionals. This article argues for further consideration of these requests and considers the ethical and legal issues that arise when preventing regret is prioritized over autonomy in medical practice. In Canada, there is a paucity of professional guidelines and articles offering practical considerations for handling such requests. Compared with the U.S. and U.K. policy contexts, we propose a patient-centered approach for practice to address requests for tubal sterilization that prioritizes informed consent and respect for patient autonomy. We ultimately aim to assure physicians that when the conditions of informed consent are met and documented, they practice within the limits of the law and in line with best ethical practice by respecting their patients' choice of contraceptive interventions and by ensuring their access to care.