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Project outline
Pregnancy and birth are normal human conditions that make for difficult legal and moral terrain. Due to intertwinement of woman and foetus, normal and legal injunctions are difficult to apply to the choices that pregnant women make. These may include choices such as drinking, smoking, or refusing medical care that may not be in the best interest of their future child.
Pregnant women experience enormous social and medical pressure, and sometimes even legal force, to avoid such behaviours, and to avoid any and all risk to the future child. They also report informal and formal pressure to undergo invasive procedures against there consent. In the Netherlands these include:
- Pressure towards forced caesarean sections;
- Threats of being reported to social services if they do not submit to medical care;
- Threats to be denied medical care if not compliant with medical reccomendations;
- In-hospital pressure to undergo unwanted surgical procedures;
- Invasive procedures, such as episiotomies without consent;
- Formal proposals to place pregnant woman under state control.
BOB体育登录网址_欧宝体育官网平台-APP|下载 research shows these pressures to be misguided; they result from a mistaken moral analysis of pregnant women’s behaviour. First, we are too quick to judge that pregnant women are harming or foresaking their duty to their future children, whereas in fact they are merely allowing harm or failing to provide a benefit – which we ought to judge considerably less harshly. Second, even though there is a future child with interests at stake, pregnant women, just like any other human retain full moral authority over their body. They therefore cannot be legally forced to undergo invasive procedures for the benefit of another.
Meet the research team
Prof Elselijn Kingma
Elselijn is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of BOB体育登录网址_欧宝体育官网平台-APP|下载 and Socrates Professor in Philosophy and Technology at the University of Eindhoven. She has research interests in philosophy of medicine, philosophy of science, metaphysics and bioethics. Elselijn has published extensively on the concepts of health and disease. Her present research is focused on two projects. One is the metaphysics of pregnancy, for which she was recently awared a 1.3 million Euro European Research Council grant, and one is on the rights and obligations of women during pregnancy and birth.
Dr Fiona Woollard
Fiona is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of BOB体育登录网址_欧宝体育官网平台-APP|下载. She has research interests in normative ethics, applied ethics and the philosophy of sex, pregnancy and early motherhood. She has published on topics including the distinction between doing and allowing harm, climate change and the non-identity problem, the moral significance of numbers, pornography and the norm of monogamy. The first project explores the Doctrine of Double Effect and the moral significance of intentions. The second explores the moral and epistemological implications of considering the experience of pregnancy.
