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Were You a Part of Your Mother?

Mind 128 (511):609-646 (2019)

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  1. Cogito, Ergo Sumus? The Pregnancy Problem in Descartes's Philosophy.Maja Sidzińska - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (2).
    Given Descartes’ metaphysical and natural-philosophic commitments, it is very difficult to theorize the pregnant human being as a human being under his system. Specifically, given (1) Descartes’ account of generation, (2) his commitment to mechanistic explanations where bodies are concerned, (3) his reliance on a subtle individuating principle for human (and animal) bodies, and (4) his metaphysics of human beings, which include minds, bodies, and mind-body unions, there is no available human substance or entity which may clearly be the subject (...)
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  • Feminist metaphysics.Sally Haslanger & Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir - 2008;2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Moral Parenthood: Not Gestational.Benjamin Lange - forthcoming - Journal of Medical Ethics.
    Parenting our biological children is a centrally important matter, but how, if it all, can it be justified? According to a contemporary influential line of thinking, the acquisition by parents of a moral right to parent their biological children should be grounded by appeal to the value of the intimate emotional relationship that gestation facilitates between a newborn and a gestational procreator. I evaluate two arguments in defence of this proposal and argue that both are unconvincing.
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  • Deadly Language Games: Theological Reflections on Emerging Reproductive Technologies.Nicholas Colgrove - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (2):67-84.
    This issue of Christian Bioethics explores theological, metaphysical, and ethical questions surrounding emerging reproductive technologies. Narratives concerning such technologies are often manipulated via “language games.” Language games involve toying with language to ensure that one’s vision of the good gains or retains political prominence. Such games are common in academic discussions of “artificial womb” technologies. Abortion proponents, for example, are already using language to dehumanize subjects within “artificial wombs.” This is unsurprising. Were relevant subjects considered persons, then abortion access (and (...)
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  • Potential Consciousness of Human Cerebral Organoids: on Similarity-Based Views in Precautionary Discourse.Sarah Diner - 2023 - Neuroethics 16 (3):1-8.
    Advances in research on human cerebral organoids (HCOs) call for a critical review of current research policies. A challenge for the evaluation of necessary research regulations lies in the severe uncertainty about future trajectories the currently very rudimentary stages of neural cell cultures might take as the technology progresses. To gain insights into organotypic cultures, ethicists, legal scholars, and neuroscientists rely on resemblances to the human brain. They refer to similarities in structural or functional terms that have been established in (...)
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  • Ectogestative Technology and the Beginning of Life.Lily Frank, Julia Hermann, Ilona Kavege & Anna Puzio - 2023 - In Ibo van de Poel (ed.), Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers. pp. 113–140.
    How could ectogestative technology disrupt gender roles, parenting practices, and concepts such as ‘birth’, ‘body’, or ‘parent’? In this chapter, we situate this emerging technology in the context of the history of reproductive technologies and analyse the potential social and conceptual disruptions to which it could contribute. An ectogestative device, better known as ‘artificial womb’, enables the extra-uterine gestation of a human being, or mammal more generally. It is currently developed with the main goal of improving the survival chances of (...)
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  • Embryonic Afterlives?Amber Griffioen - 2022 - TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 8 (1).
    While much has been written on the moral and metaphysical status of fetuses in Christian bioethics, little thought has been given to how we might characterize the afterlives of the unborn, especially of those human biological individuals who die before even developing a body that could theoretically be resurrected. In this paper, I therefore undertake an examination of questions surrounding the afterlife, specifically as it relates to early pregnancy loss. I first lay out what I call the “problem of weird (...)
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  • The Logic of Pregnancy.Jonna Bornemark - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (2):128-140.
    This article takes its point of departure in Bracha Ettinger’s discussion on the “matrixial borderspace”: the structure of the experience of “the womb,” both from a “mother-pole” and a “fetus-pole”. Ettinger describes this borderspace as a place of differentiation-in-co-emergence, separation-in-jointness, and distance-in-proximity. The question this article poses is what kind of logic this experience is an expression of, as there seems to be a discrepancy in relation to the classical Aristotelian logic of identity. As an alternative to classical Aristotelian logic, (...)
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  • Do Division Puzzles Provide a Reason to Doubt That Your Organism Was Ever a Zygote?David Hershenov & Rose Hershenov - 2020 - Public Affairs Quarterly 34 (4):368-388.
    A number of philosophers maintain that the destruction of an embryo in the first 2 weeks after fertilization is not morally problematic as it is metaphysically impossible for any human organism to then have existed. We contend that the typical adult human organism was once a zygote so there is no metaphysical shortcut to justify early abortion. We show that five arguments against human organisms ever having been zygotes fail. All of the arguments have to do with one variant or (...)
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  • Life, mind, agency: Why Markov blankets fail the test of evolution.Walter Veit & Heather Browning - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e214.
    There has been much criticism of the idea that Friston's free-energy principle can unite the life and mind sciences. Here, we argue that perhaps the greatest problem for the totalizing ambitions of its proponents is a failure to recognize the importance of evolutionary dynamics and to provide a convincing adaptive story relating free-energy minimization to organismal fitness.
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  • Pregnancy, Parthood and Proper Overlap: A Critique of Kingma.Alexander Geddes - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):476-491.
    Elselijn Kingma argues that, in cases of mammalian placental pregnancy, the foster (roughly, the post-implantation embryo/foetus) is part of the gravida (the pregnant organism). But she does not consider the possibility of proper overlap. I show that this generates a number of serious problems for her argument and trace the oversight to a quite general issue within the literature on biological individuality. Doing so provides an opportunity to pull apart and clarify the relations between some importantly distinct questions concerning organismality (...)
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  • Toward a Philosophical Theology of Pregnancy Loss.Amber L. Griffioen - 2022 - In Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode (ed.), The Meaning of Mourning: Perspectives on Death, Loss, and Grief. Lexington Books.
    Issues surrounding pregnancy loss are rarely addressed in Christian philosophy. Yet a modest estimate based on the empirical and medical literature places the rate of pregnancy loss between fertilization and term at somewhere between 40–60%. If miscarriage really is as common as the research gives us to believe, then it would seem a pressing topic for a Christian philosophy of the future to address. This paper attempts to begin this work by showing how thinking more closely about pregnancy loss understood (...)
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  • Enduring Senses.Graeme A. Forbes & Nathan Wildman - 2022 - Synthese 200 (291):1-21.
    The meanings of words seem to change over time. But while there is a growing body of literature in linguistics and philosophy about meaning change, there has been little discussion about the metaphysical underpinnings of meaning change. The central aim of this paper is to push this discussion forward by surveying the terrain and advocating for a particular metaphysical picture. In so doing, we hope to clarify various aspects of the nature of meaning change, as well as prompt future philosophical (...)
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  • Biological Individuality and the Foetus Problem.William Morgan - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):799-816.
    The Problem of Biological Individuality is the problem of how to count organisms. Whilst counting organisms may seem easy, the biological world is full of difficult cases such as colonial siphonophores and aspen tree groves. One of the main solutions to the Problem of Biological Individuality is the Physiological Approach. Drawing on an argument made by Eric Olson in the personal identity debate, I argue that the Physiological Approach faces a metaphysical problem - the ‘Foetus Problem’. This paper illustrates how (...)
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  • Your Mother Should Know: Pregnancy, the Ethics of Abortion and Knowledge through Acquaintance of Moral Value.Fiona Woollard - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3):471-492.
    An important strand in the debate on abortion focuses on the moral status of fetuses. Knowledge of the moral value of fetuses is needed to assess fetuses’ moral status. As Errol Lord argues, acquaintance plays a key role in moral and aesthetic knowledge. Many pregnant persons have acquaintance with their fetus that provides privileged access to knowledge about that fetus’ moral value. This knowledge is (a) very difficult to acquire without being pregnant and (b) relevant for assessing the moral status (...)
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  • Introduction to the Special Issue on Philosophy of Medicine.Saana Jukola & Anke Bueter - 2021 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (2):(SI1)5-8.
    This article is an introduction to the special issue on philosophy of medicine. Philosophy of medicine is a field that has flourished in the last couple of decades and has become increasingly institutionalized. The introduction begins with a brief overview of some of the most central recent developments in the field. It then describes the six articles that comprise this issue.
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  • The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today.Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, Sean Aas, Dan Brudney, Jessica Flanigan, S. Matthew Liao, Alex London, Wayne Sumner & Julian Savulescu - 2021 - American Journal of Bioethics 22 (12):10-21.
    In some views, philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over. While philosophers were especially important in the early days of the field, so the argument goes, the majority of the work in bioethics today involves the “simple” application of existing philosophical principles or concepts, as well as empirical work in bioethics. Here, we address this view head on and ask: What is the role of philosophy in bioethics today? This paper has three specific aims: (1) to respond to skeptics and (...)
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  • Evaluating Ectogenesis via the Metaphysics of Pregnancy.Suki Finn & Sasha Isaac - 2021 - In Robbie Davis-Floyd (ed.), Birthing Techno-Sapiens: Human-Technology Co-Evolution and the Future of Reproduction. Routledge: Taylor & Francis. pp. Chapter 8.
    Ectogenesis, or “artificial womb technology,” has been heralded by some, such as prominent feminist Shulamith Firestone, as a way to liberate women. In this chapter, we challenge this view by offering an alternative analysis of the technology as relying upon and perpetuating a problematic model of pregnancy which, rather than liberating women, serves to devalue them. We look to metaphysics as the abstract study of reality to elucidate how the entities in a pregnancy are related to one another. We consider (...)
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  • How Many Organisms during a Pregnancy?Jonathan Grose - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):1049-1060.
    Mammalian placental pregnancy is a neglected problem case for theories of organismality. This example is closer to home than those typically discussed within philosophy of biology. I apply evolutio...
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  • Why Composition Matters.Andrew M. Bailey & Andrew Brenner - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (8):934-949.
    Many say that ontological disputes are defective because they are unimportant or without substance. In this paper, we defend ontological disputes from the charge, with a special focus on disputes over the existence of composite objects. Disputes over the existence of composite objects, we argue, have a number of substantive implications across a variety of topics in metaphysics, science, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Since the disputes over the existence of composite objects have these substantive implications, they are (...)
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  • Gestaticide: Killing the Subject of the Artificial Womb.Daniel Rodger, Nicholas Colgrove & Bruce Philip Blackshaw - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (12):e53.
    The rapid development of artificial womb technologies means that we must consider if and when it is permissible to kill the human subject of ectogestation—recently termed a ‘gestateling’ by Elizabeth Chloe Romanis—prior to ‘birth’. We describe the act of deliberately killing the gestateling as gestaticide, and argue that there are good reasons to maintain that gestaticide is morally equivalent to infanticide, which we consider to be morally impermissible. First, we argue that gestaticide is harder to justify than abortion, primarily because (...)
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  • Ectogestation and the Problem of Abortion.Christopher M. Stratman - 2020 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (4):683-700.
    Ectogestation involves the gestation of a fetus in an ex utero environment. The possibility of this technology raises a significant question for the abortion debate: Does a woman’s right to end her pregnancy entail that she has a right to the death of the fetus when ectogestation is possible? Some have argued that it does not Mathison & Davis. Others claim that, while a woman alone does not possess an individual right to the death of the fetus, the genetic parents (...)
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  • Neonatal incubator or artificial womb? Distinguishing ectogestation and ectogenesis using the metaphysics of pregnancy.Elselijn Kingma & Suki Finn - 2020 - Bioethics 34 (4):354-363.
    A 2017 Nature report was widely touted as hailing the arrival of the artificial womb. But the scientists involved claim their technology is merely an improvement in neonatal care. This raises an under-considered question: what differentiates neonatal incubation from artificial womb technology? Considering the nature of gestation—or metaphysics of pregnancy—(a) identifies more profound differences between fetuses and neonates/babies than their location (in or outside the maternal body) alone: fetuses and neonates have different physiological and physical characteristics; (b) characterizes birth as (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Metaphysics of Surrogacy.Suki Finn - 2018 - In David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 649-659.
    As with most other areas of reproduction, surrogacy is highly regulated. But the legislation and policies on surrogacy are written in such ways that make large (and possibly mistaken) assumptions about the metaphysical relationship between the mother and the fetus – whether the fetus is a part of, or contained by, the mother. It is the purpose of this chapter to highlight these assumptions, and to demonstrate the impact that alternative metaphysical views can have on our conceptualization of surrogacy. With (...)
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  • If Abortion, then Infanticide.David B. Hershenov & Rose J. Hershenov - 2017 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38 (5):387-409.
    Our contention is that all of the major arguments for abortion are also arguments for permitting infanticide. One cannot distinguish the fetus from the infant in terms of a morally significant intrinsic property, nor are they morally discernible in terms of standing in different relationships to others. The logic of our position is that if such arguments justify abortion, then they also justify infanticide. If we are right that infanticide is not justified, then such arguments will fail to justify abortion. (...)
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  • Can You Do Harm to Your Fetus? Pregnancy, Barriers, and the Doing/Allowing Distinction.Elselijn Kingma & Fiona Woollard - 2024 - Ethics 135 (2):290-319.
    When pregnant persons do not behave in the way deemed optimal for their fetus, they are often framed as doing harm. This framing acts as a justificatory bypass for defenses of widespread expectations of pregnant persons, allowing such defenses to avoid substantial questions about special obligations in pregnancy. Our main claim is that this justificatory bypass is unwarranted: in many cases either the pregnant person does not count as doing harm or substantive questions about special obligations cannot be avoided. Our (...)
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  • Cogito, Ergo Sumus? The Pregnancy Problem in Descartes’s Philosophy.Maja Sidzińska - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (2):209-240.
    Given Descartes’s metaphysical and natural-philosophic commitments, it is difficult to theorize the pregnant human being as a human being under his system. Specifically, given (1) Descartes’s account of generation; (2) his commitment to mechanistic explanations where bodies are concerned; (3) his reliance on a subtle individuating principle for human (and animal) bodies; and (4) his metaphysics of human beings, which include minds, bodies, and mind-body unions, there is no available human substance or entity that may clearly be the subject of (...)
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  • Abortion Pills: Killing or Letting Die?David Hershenov - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (2):134-144.
    Christian pro-lifers often respond to Thomson’s defense of abortion that the violinist is allowed to die while the embryo is killed. Boonin and McMahan counter that this distinction does not provide an objection to extraction abortions that disconnect embryos and allow them to die. I disagree. I first argue that letting die and killing are not to be distinguished by differences between acts and omissions, moral and immoral motives, intentional or unintentional deaths, and causing or not causing a pathology. I (...)
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  • Pregnant Thinkers.David Mark Kovacs - 2025 - Philosophical Quarterly 75 (1):104-124.
    Do pregnant mothers have fetuses as parts? According to the “parthood view” they do, while according to the “containment view” they don’t. This paper raises a novel puzzle about pregnancy: if mothers have their fetuses as parts, then wherever there is a pregnant mother, there is also a smaller thinking being that has every part of the mother except for those that overlap with the fetus. This problem resembles a familiar overpopulation puzzle from the personal identity literature, known as the (...)
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  • Death as the Cessation of an Organism and the Moral Status Alternative.Piotr Grzegorz Nowak - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (5):504-518.
    The mainstream concept of death—the biological one—identifies death with the cessation of an organism. In this article, I challenge the mainstream position, showing that there is no single well-established concept of an organism and no universal concept of death in biological terms. Moreover, some of the biological views on death, if applied in the context of bedside decisions, might imply unacceptable consequences. I argue the moral concept of death—one similar to that of Robert Veatch—overcomes such difficulties. The moral view identifies (...)
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  • Mereotopology of Pregnancy.Suki Finn - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (3):283-298.
    Consider the following two metaphysical questions about pregnancy: (1) When does a new organism of a certain kind start to exist? (2) What is the mereological and topological relationship between the pregnant organism and with what it is pregnant? Despite assumptions made in the literature, I take these questions to be independent of each other, such that an answer to one does not provide an answer to the other. I argue that the way to connect them is via a maximality (...)
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  • (1 other version)Being-from-Birth: Pregnancy and Philosophy.Suki Finn - 2023 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 19 (1):7-32.
    Women are underrepresented in philosophy. And pregnancy is under-researched in philosophy. Can a connection be made between the two? I will argue that whilst the counterfactual of ‘had women historically been better represented in philosophy then pregnancy would have been too’ may be true, it is not necessarily the case that we can now, in the present day, expect (or desire) a correlation. In order to understand the gap between these two areas of underrepresentation, one need only adopt a non- (...)
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  • Why the Debate about the Metaphysics of Biological Species Should Not Be Deflated.Giulio Sciacca - 2020 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 23 (2):474-497.
    Some philosophers of biology state that the metaphysical status of biological species is context determined by the use different branches of biology make of their corresponding proper names, so that one and the same biological species can be both an individual and a natural kind. In this paper, I aim to undermine the idea, often associated with the present thesis, according to which the debate about the metaphysical status of biological species should be deflated, since it would be possible to (...)
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  • Birth: A radically new meditation for philosophy.Stella Villarmea - 2024 - Diogenes 65 (1):44-54.
    This paper explains why and how we should introduce birth into the canon of subjects explored by philosophy. It focuses on the epistemology of birth, namely, on the nature, origin, and limits of the knowledge produced by and/or related to giving birth. The paper provides a view on the philosophy of birth, i.e., an approach to construct a new logos for genos.
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  • Pregnancy and superior moral status: a proposal for two thresholds of personhood.Heloise Robinson - 2023 - Journal of Medical Ethics 50 (1):12-19.
    In this paper, I suggest that, if we are committed to accepting a threshold approach to personhood, according to which all beings above the threshold are persons with equal moral status, there are strong reasons to also recognise a second threshold that would be reached through human pregnancy, and that would confer on pregnant women a temporary superior moral status. This proposal is not based on the moral status of the fetus, but on the moral status of the pregnant woman. (...)
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  • Jacob’s Understanding of Reproduction: Challenges from an Organismic Collaborative Framework.Arantza Etxeberria Agiriano - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (2):535-553.
    François Jacob viewed the living world as interconnected by reproductive links, suggesting that biology should not limit itself to studying individual organisms given their ephemeral nature. He believed that reproduction was the cause and purpose of life, asserting that the genetic program played a crucial role in physiology and evolutionary biology, offering a potential unifying framework for biology. While acknowledging the importance of Jacob’s idea of reproduction as a nexus, there are criticisms regarding his reliance on genetic programs. Various approaches (...)
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  • Ontology as a Guide to Politics? Judith Butler on Interdependency, Vulnerability, and Nonviolence.Jack Wearing - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    In recent work, Judith Butler has sought to develop a ‘new bodily ontology’ with a substantive normative upshot: recognition of our shared bodily condition, they argue, can support an ethic of nonviolence and a renewed commitment to egalitarian social conditions. However, the route from Butler’s ontological claims to their ethico-political commitments is not clear: how can the general ontological features of embodiment Butler identifies introduce constraints on behaviour or political arrangements? Ontology, one might think, is neutral on questions of politics. (...))
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  • What realism about agents requires.Mark Sprevak - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e211.
    Bruineberg et al. argue that the formal notion of a Markov blanket fails to provide a single principled boundary between an agent and its environment. I argue that one should not expect a general theory of agenthood to provide a single boundary; and the reliance on auxiliary assumptions is neither arbitrary nor reason to suspect instrumentalism.
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  • One or two? A Process View of pregnancy.Anne Sophie Meincke - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1495-1521.
    How many individuals are present where we see a pregnant individual? Within a substance ontological framework, there are exactly two possible answers to this question. The standard answer—two individuals—is typically championed by scholars endorsing the predominant Containment View of pregnancy, according to which the foetus resides in the gestating organism like in a container. The alternative answer—one individual—has recently found support in the Parthood View, according to which the foetus is a part of the gestating organism. Here I propose a (...)
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  • Understanding disease and illness.Jeremy R. Simon, Havi Carel & Alexander Bird - 2017 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38 (4):239-244.
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  • Protecting the future child: Foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, easy rescue and the regulation of maternal behaviour.Catherine Mills - 2023 - Bioethics 37 (8):771-778.
    This paper argues that social contexts of inequality are crucial to understanding the ethics of gestational harm and responsibility. Recent debates on gestational harm have largely ignored the social context of gestators, including contexts of inequality and injustice. This can reinforce existing social injustices arising from colonialism, socio‐economic inequality and racism, for example, through increased regulation of maternal behaviour. To demonstrate this, I focus on the related notions of the ‘future child’ and an obligation of easy rescue, which have been (...)
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  • Women and Their Uteruses: Symbolic Vessels for Prejudiced Expectations.Paola Nicolas, Jeanne Proust & Margaret M. Fabiszak - 2022 - International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 15 (1):49-70.
    What is a uterus to a woman and to society? This article calls for a holistic reevaluation of how we perceive and what we expect from women’s uteruses. We explore the powerful and deeply rooted cultural representations of women’s uteruses as mere receptacles and the impact of such representations on biological categories, medical practices, and current policies. Considering controversies surrounding hysterectomies, cesarean sections, and uterus transplants, we elucidate ambivalent narratives that either promote an essentialist approach where the uterus is emblematic (...)
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  • Methodology for the metaphysics of pregnancy.Suki Finn - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-19.
    One of the central questions in the metaphysics of pregnancy is this: Is the foetus a part of the mother? In this paper I aim not to answer this question, but rather to raise methodological concerns regarding how to approach answering it. I will outline how various areas attempt to answer whether the foetus is a part of the mother so as to demonstrate the methodological problems that each faces. My positive suggestion will be to adopt a method of reflective (...)
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  • Biological Individuality, Pregnancy, and (Mammalian) Reproduction.Elselijn Kingma - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):1037-1048.
    Mammals are usually considered unproblematic as biological individuals. This article contends the opposite. Once we consider pregnancy, criteria for biological individuality are not easily applicab...
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  • Parental obligation and compelled caesarean section: careful analogies and reliable reasoning about individual cases.Elselijn Kingma & Lindsey Porter - 2021 - Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (4):280-286.
    Whether it is morally permissible to compel women to undergo a caesarean section is a topic of longstanding debate. Despite plenty of arguments against the moral permissibility of a forced caesarean section, the question keeps cropping up. This paper seeks to scrutinise a particular moral argument in favour of compulsion: the appeal to parental obligation. We present what we take to be a distillation of the basic form of this argument. We then argue that, in the absence of an exhaustive (...)
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  • Nine Months.Elselijn Kingma - 2020 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 45 (3):371-386.
    When did we begin to exist? Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard argue that a new human organism comes into existence neither earlier nor later than the moment of gastrulation: 16 days after conception. Several critics have responded that the onset of the organism must happen earlier; closer to conception. This article makes a radically different claim: if we accept Smith and Brogaard’s ontological commitments, then human organisms start, on average, roughly nine months after conception. The main point of contention is (...)
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  • Avant-propos.Jacob Dahl Rendtorff & Nicole G. Albert - 2022 - Diogène n° 275-276 (3):3-6.
    L’article se concentre sur la pandémie de covid-19 dans une tentative d’évaluer la contribution éventuelle de l’analyse philosophique à la compréhension et à la résolution des problèmes éthiques, juridiques et sociopolitiques qu’elle soulève. On aborde une série de dilemmes cruciaux qui requièrent des décisions pratiques, avant et après la production et la disponibilité des vaccins, à la lumière des théories éthiques et politiques contemporaines. Il s’avère que dans la plupart des cas les conceptions déontologiques semblent l’emporter sur les considérations conséquentialistes, (...)
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  • Pregnant Females as Historical Individuals: An Insight From the Philosophy of Evo-Devo.Laura Nuño de la Rosa, Mihaela Pavličev & Arantza Etxeberria - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 11:572106.
    Criticisms of the “container” model of pregnancy picturing female and embryo as separate entities multiply in various philosophical and scientific contexts during the last decades. In this paper, we examine how this model underlies received views of pregnancy in evolutionary biology, in the characterization of the transition from oviparity to viviparity in mammals and in the selectionist explanations of pregnancy as an evolutionary strategy. In contrast, recent evo-devo studies on eutherian reproduction, including the role of inflammation and new maternal cell (...)
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  • A Relational Ethics of Pregnancy.Jemma Rollo - 2022 - International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 15 (1):27-48.
    A relational, feminist ethics of pregnancy sees the fetus as valuable both relationally and biologically, rather than minimized or ignored. Women are always at the center of ethical concern. To avoid gender-based discrimination, women’s bodily integrity, consent (to pregnancy), and physical “nestedness” (containment of the fetus within a person’s body) must be considered primary ethical concerns. This relational approach accounts for the significance of pregnancy and the grief of pregnancy loss while concurrently providing an ethical justification for abortion. This refined (...)
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  • More than an idea: why ectogestation should become a concrete option.Andrea Bidoli - forthcoming - Journal of Medical Ethics.
    This paper calls for the development of a method of ectogestation as an emancipatory intervention for women. I argue that ectogestation would have a dual social benefit: first, by providing a gestational alternative to pregnancy, it would create unique conditions to reevaluate one’s reproductive preferences—which, for women, always include gestational considerations—and to satisfy a potential preference not to gestate. Enabling the satisfaction of such a preference is particularly valuable due to the pressures women face to embrace pregnancy as central to (...)
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