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 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 secondary claim is that direct engagement with these substantive questions is unlikely to justify widespread expectations on pregnant people.
Harm, Pregnancy, deontological distinctions, doing vs allowing, ethics
290-319
Kingma, Elselijn
2bb4825b-b246-495f-a353-d89bb1438478
Woollard, Fiona
c3caccc2-68c9-47c8-b2d3-9735d09f1679
January 2025
Kingma, Elselijn
2bb4825b-b246-495f-a353-d89bb1438478
Woollard, Fiona
c3caccc2-68c9-47c8-b2d3-9735d09f1679
Kingma, Elselijn and Woollard, Fiona
(2025)
Can you do harm to your fetus? Pregnancy, barriers, and the doing/allowing distinction.
Ethics, 135 (2), , [319].
(doi:10.1086/732613).
Abstract
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 secondary claim is that direct engagement with these substantive questions is unlikely to justify widespread expectations on pregnant people.
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KingmaWoollardCanYouDoHarmToYourFetusPureVersion
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 17 April 2024
e-pub ahead of print date: 3 December 2024
Published date: January 2025
Keywords:
Harm, Pregnancy, deontological distinctions, doing vs allowing, 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: 28 Jan 2026 05:01
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Author:
Elselijn Kingma
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