Pregnancy presents a serious challenge to our approach to personhood and equality. We normally think that “one equals one”: each person is equal to every other person. But in pregnancy we do not clearly have only “one” person, even if we do not think that the fetus is a person. Indeed, if we think that the fetus is part of the pregnant woman’s body, and if we reject a containment view of pregnancy, we might need to take a different approach. While we have debated at length the moral status or personhood of the fetus, this talk will examine a different question entirely: the personhood of the pregnant woman. If we think that pregnancy is a unique form of bodily existence, with a higher moral value, there may be reasons to recognise that a pregnant woman has a unique form of personhood, calling for a stronger set of rights. This recognition could also have important practical implications in many areas, including with respect to maternity care, maternal-fetal conflicts, sexual violence, surrogacy, and artificial gestation technologies. It might also be necessary so that we can achieve genuine gender equality.
In this talk, the author will discuss her work in progress in relation to her development of a new argument about the status of pregnant women. Some initial elements of this argument have already been published in a Feature Article in the Journal of Medical Ethics (‘Pregnancy and superior moral status: a proposal for two thresholds of personhood’). The author is now working on developing the argument further in a book, now under contract with OUP, and provisionally titled Pregnant Personhood: An Argument About Equality.
