Can You Do Harm to Your Fetus? Pregnancy, Barriers, and the Doing/Allowing Distinction
Can You Do Harm to Your Fetus? Pregnancy, Barriers, and the Doing/Allowing Distinction
When pregnant persons do not behave in the way that is optimal for their fetus, they are often framed as doing harm. This framing acts provides a justificatory bypass for defences of widespread expectations of pregnant persons, allowing them to avoid substantial questions about special obligations in pregnancy. In many cases, this framing is either incorrect or misleading. Either (1) it is incorrect because the pregnant person does not count as doing harm, or (2) it is misleading because the classification as doing harm presupposes an answer to precisely those substantive questions that the justificatory bypass functions to avoid.
Harm, Pregnancy, doing vs allowing, deontological distinctions, ethics
Kingma, Elselijn
2bb4825b-b246-495f-a353-d89bb1438478
Woollard, Fiona
c3caccc2-68c9-47c8-b2d3-9735d09f1679
Kingma, Elselijn
2bb4825b-b246-495f-a353-d89bb1438478
Woollard, Fiona
c3caccc2-68c9-47c8-b2d3-9735d09f1679
Kingma, Elselijn and Woollard, Fiona
(2024)
Can You Do Harm to Your Fetus? Pregnancy, Barriers, and the Doing/Allowing Distinction.
Ethics.
(In Press)
Abstract
When pregnant persons do not behave in the way that is optimal for their fetus, they are often framed as doing harm. This framing acts provides a justificatory bypass for defences of widespread expectations of pregnant persons, allowing them to avoid substantial questions about special obligations in pregnancy. In many cases, this framing is either incorrect or misleading. Either (1) it is incorrect because the pregnant person does not count as doing harm, or (2) it is misleading because the classification as doing harm presupposes an answer to precisely those substantive questions that the justificatory bypass functions to avoid.
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Accepted/In Press date: 17 April 2024
Keywords:
Harm, Pregnancy, doing vs allowing, deontological distinctions, ethics
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 491932
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/491932
ISSN: 0014-1704
PURE UUID: dd6224e1-19a1-4146-abd4-a59533e4d21d
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Date deposited: 08 Jul 2024 17:23
Last modified: 11 Jul 2024 04:29
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Author:
Elselijn Kingma
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