Drawing on sociological and anthropological studies, the aim of this article is to reconstruct how obstetric technologies contribute to a moral conception of pregnancy and motherhood, and to evaluate that conception from a normative point of view. Obstetrics and midwifery, so the assumption, are value-laden, value-producing and value-reproducing practices, values that shape the social perception of what it means to be a “good” pregnant woman and to be a “good” mother. Activities in the medical field of reproduction contribute to “kinning”, (...) that is the making of particular social relationships marked by closeness and special moral obligations. Three technologies, which belong to standard procedures in prenatal care in postmodern societies, are presently investigated: informed consent in prenatal care, obstetric sonogram, and birth plan. Their widespread application issupposed to serve the moral goal of effecting patient autonomy. A reconstruction of the actual moral implications of these technologies, however, reveals that this goal is missed in multiple ways. Informed consent situations are marked by involuntariness and blindness to social dimensions of decision-making; obstetric sonograms construct moral subjectivity and agency in a way that attribute inconsistent and unreasonable moral responsibilities to the pregnant woman; and birth plans obscure the need for a healthcare environment that reflects a shared-decision-making model, rather than a rational-choice-framework. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with reasoning about matters of justice. There is no doubt that justice-reasoning is a significant mode of ethical reasoning and its importance is therefore generally accepted. But there is a considerable debate concerning the role formal justice can play in reasoning about justice. In this paper, I first provide an analysis of formal justice. I then show that the concept of formal justice is identical to one notion of fairness and I illustrate the function (...) of formal justice in reasoning about issues of fairness. In the third section, I argue that formal justice is an essential component of justice tout court and I demonstrate its value for understanding and assessing reasoning about matters of justice. The overall result of this investigation is that formal justice is an important notion that has a special function in moral thinking, which has not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. (shrink)