As a 52-year-old academic and mother of three, this research explores the ethics of the question ‘do I have time to go skateboarding?’ Using the themes of time, injury, ageing and learning, it explores the question in relation to Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity. The approach employs autoethnographic and sensory methods to document the authors own experience of learning to skateboard in her late forties and uses learning to skateboard as a vehicle from which to consider time and productivity. (...) Embracing Beauvoir’s ethics of transcendence in navigating the psychological burden of ageing and informing the ongoing methodological approach required for making time to play, the author subverts ideas of progression and knowledge acquisition from childhood to adulthood and explores instead the converse transition from adult to child. The article draws conclusions about the value of lifelong learning and what expanded ideas about productivity mean for our ethical positioning in the world. How being in the skatepark together requires an ethical contract between skateboarders, an unambiguous ethics of being together where adhering to a system of unwritten rules means that everyone has enough space to stay safe. Risk and the time implications of injury are explored throughout in terms of the choices we make at different stages of our lives as we navigate a balance between personal desire and social good. (shrink)

The Shannon Matthews case was perhaps unique in British criminal history. For a period of several days, a young girl of 9 years of age was missing from home. During this period there was an unprecedented amount of both police and media attention devoted to the case, including TV appeals for her safe return and offers of financial rewards for information leading to her recovery. Ultimately, it emerged that the mother of the child had conspired with the child’s uncle, (...) who had kidnapped her and kept her captive throughout the period of supposed disappearance. This article uses a corpus of newspaper articles gathered from both the period of the search and subsequently the trial of both the mother and the uncle, which resulted in convictions for both. It examines the representations of all of the actors in this scenario, both visual and verbal, in an attempt to elucidate the ideologies inherent in the case and the ways in which the victim and perpetrators were portrayed throughout the dramatic period of her disappearance. (shrink)

Pregnancy and childbirth have become a dangerous journey for Black women as harrowing stories of death and near‐death experiences resonate within Black communities. While the causes of pregnancy‐related morbidity and mortality are well documented, little is known about how Black Canadian women feel protected from undesirable maternal health outcomes when accessing and receiving pregnancy and intrapartum care. This critical qualitative inquiry sheds light on Black women's perceived sense of safety in accessing pregnancy and intrapartum care. Twenty‐four in‐depth interviews were conducted (...) with Black women who were pregnant or had given birth. Five interconnected themes were generated through thematic analysis: (1) There is a lot of prejudice towards us, (2) We are treated as sick bodies, (3) There is a lot of stereotypes towards us, (4) Our care is lacking in quality, and (5) We feel unsafe in the healthcare system. These themes highlight the perils faced by Black women accessing pregnancy and intrapartum care. The right to safe motherhood and equitable care for Black women should be a national priority in Canada to avert a looming crisis. (shrink)

Maternal morbidity and mortality are high in the Indian context, but the majority of maternal deaths could be avoided by prompt and effective access to intrapartum care (WHO, 1999). Understanding the care seeking responses to intrapartum morbidities is crucial if maternal health is to be effectively improved, and maternal mortality reduced. This paper presents the results of a prospective study of 388 women followed through delivery and traditional postpartum in rural Karnataka in southern India. In this setting, few women use (...) the existing health facilities and most deliveries occur at home. The analysis uses quantitative data, collected via questionnaires administered to women both during pregnancy and immediately after delivery. By virtue of its prospective design, the study gives a unique insight into intentions for intrapartum care during pregnancy as well as events following morbidities during labour. Routine care in the intrapartum period, both within institutions and at home, and impediments to appropriate care are also examined. The study was designed to collect information about health seeking decisions made by women and their families as pregnancies unfolded, rather than trying to capture women’s experience from a retrospective instrument. The data set is therefore a rich source of quantitative information, which incorporates details of event sequences and health service utilization not previously collected in a Safe Motherhood study. Additional qualitative information was also available from concurrent in-depth interviews with pregnant women, their families, health care providers and other key informants in the area. The level of unplanned institutional care seeking during the intrapartum period within the study area was very high, increasing from 11% planning deliveries at a facility to an eventual 35% actually delivering in hospitals. In addition there was a significant move away from planned deliveries with the auxiliary nurse midwive (ANM), to births with a lay attendant or dai. The proportion of women who planned for an ANM to assist was 49%, as compared with the actual occurrence, which was less than half of this proportion. Perceived quality of care was found to be an important factor in health seeking behaviour, as was wealth, caste, education and experience of previous problems in pregnancy. Actual care given by a range of practitioners was found to contain both beneficial and undesirable elements. As a response to serious morbidities experienced within the study period, many women were able to seek care although sometimes after a long delay. Those women who experienced inadequate progression of labour pains were most likely to proceed unexpectedly to a hospital delivery. (shrink)

This paper illustrates the importance of monitoring health facility-level information to monitor changes in maternal mortality risks. The annual facility-level maternal mortality ratios (MMRs), complications to live births ratios and case fatality ratios (CFRs) were computed from data recorded during 2007 and 2009 in 31 upgraded public sector health facilities across Pakistan. The facility-level MMR declined by about 18%; both the number of Caesarean sections and the episodes of complications as a percentage of live births increased; and CFR based on (...) Caesarean sections and episodes of complications declined by 29% and 37%, respectively. The observed increases in the proportion of women with complications among those who come to these facilities point to a reduction in the delay in reaching facilities (first and second delays; Thaddeus & Maine, 1994); the decrease in CFRs points to improvements in treating obstetric complications and a reduction in the delay in receiving treatment once at facilities (the third delay). These findings point to a decline in maternal mortality risks among communities served by these facilities. A system of woman-level data collection instituted at health facilities with comprehensive emergency obstetric care is essential to monitor changes in the effects of any reduction in the three delays and any improvement in quality of care or the effectiveness of treating pregnancy-related complications among women reaching these facilities. Such a system of information gathering at these health facilities would also help policymakers and programme mangers to measure and improve the effectiveness of safe-motherhood initiatives and to monitor progress being made toward achieving the fifth Millennium Development Goal. (shrink)

Mass Hysteria examines the medical and cultural practices surrounding pregnancy, new motherhood, and infant feeding. Late eighteenth century transformations in these practices reshaped mothers' bodies, and contemporary norms and routines of prenatal care and early motherhood have inherited the legacy of that era. As a result, mothers are socially positioned in ways that can make it difficult for them to establish and maintain healthy and safe boundaries and appropriate divisions between public and private space.

This article explores late works by contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois that illuminate current concerns about ageing maternal bodies and the ambivalent responses of fear and loathing that they provoke. In 2003, Louise Bourgeois made an installation for the Freud Museum in Vienna entitled The Reticent Child, on the subject of her own earlier pregnancy and birth of her son, one of several works featuring maternity and fertility which Bourgeois has created in old age. In Nature Study 2007, made at the (...) age of 96 years, she depicts carnal couples and pregnant and birthing figures embodied in brilliant pinks and scarlet reds. Bourgeois represents women as the powerful agents of the maternal function, marking a return to motherhood as a central topic of her earlier work. Edward Said posited sources of cultural meaning as ‘the whole notion of beginning, the moment of birth and origin … reproductive generation, maturity’, and ‘the last great problematic … the last and late period of life, the decay of the body’ (Said, 2006: 4–6). What does it mean for Bourgeois to return to the theme of birth in her nineties and how does it resonate with contemporary anxieties about the ageing maternal body? If the space of the gallery is a safe arena for a woman artist to present sexuality and maternity in old age, how are older women who break codes of fertility represented elsewhere? In a culture which is hostile to the conjunction of ageing women with motherhood, I shall argue that Bourgeois’ late maternal works can help to undo the taboo on older mothers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface At a time when access to safe abortions is being curtailed in the United States under the pretext of a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this Feminist Studies issue focuses on abortion and women’s embodiment. The essays by Melissa Oliver-Powell, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, and Jennifer L. Holland each contribute new approaches to the stillvexed topic of abortion, positioning movements for abortion access in relation to historical (...) and ecological change. Two collaboratively written essays, by South American authors María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra and Tania Pérez-Bustos, and by North American and European authors Laura Bisaillon with six colleagues, both center the body within feminist labor, exploring how the embodied experience of work can also be a site of knowledge-making. Other authors push us to move beyond humanistic understandings of affect and the body in feminist work, as Nathan Snaza shows in a review essay of four recent books engaging “Biopolitics without Bodies.” Poems by Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Darlene Taylor, and Abby Minor also feature experiences of bodily violence and bodily pleasure, while Ellyn Weiss discusses the distinctive representations of bodies in the visual art of Swedish-American artist Anna U. Davis. To close the issue, two News and Views pieces by Pang Laikwan and Sealing Cheng on the recent protest movement in Hong Kong provide two complementary perspectives on living through tumultuous political times. Our next issue will include content directly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first essay, Melissa Oliver-Powell’s “Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France” addresses the complexities of anti-​ abortion 8 rhetoric in France. Placing Varda’s 1977 film in the historical context of French nationalistic anxiety about low birthrates in the twentieth century, Oliver-Powell argues that the film deconstructs polarized narratives about abortion. While dominant cultural representations of abortion typically depicted it as the result of female irresponsibility or traumatic victimization, Varda’s film rejects the binary concepts of villain and victim and questions the presumption that women always suffer when exercising their reproductive choice. Oliver-Powell situates Varda alongside the 343 eminent French female cultural leaders who composed a famous 1971 Manifesto publicly declaring themselves criminals for having had illegal abortions and presents simultaneous histories of French feminism and French cinema. Varda’s film constructs a feminist representation of abortion that avoids foregrounding women ’s suffering and instead emphasizes empowerment and solidarity. Its narrative features two women friends, both treated unjustly by France’s abortion laws, who participate in the movement for reform over a fourteen -year span. Varda represents the interplay of motherhood with women ’s lives as a continuum, not a disruptive episode, and she blends documentary -style devices with imaginative musical interludes: she shows actual women seeking abortions in Holland and includes songs about abortion, pregnancy, and motherhood. Oliver-Powell claims that Varda dramatizes unprecedented representations “of female friendship without pathology, of abortion without guilt, death or persecution, of motherhood without objectification....” A second essay, Rachel Hurst’s “Abortion as a Feminist Pedagogy of Grief in Marianne Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water,” proposes that the championing of women’s reproductive rights could better account for the context of difficult emotions and an imperfect world. Hurst uses reproductive justice approaches to critique simplistic rights-based arguments for abortion, premised on liberal concepts of choice and autonomy, which fail to understand the material conditions of poor women and especially women of color. Such analyses emphasize the necessity of rights discourses that include the right to bear and parent one’s own children free from violence and economic hardship, and they advocate the transformative possibilities of acknowledging rather than suppressing women’s ambivalence about their own abortions as well as others’ choices. Hurst describes a collaboration between two contemporary Canadian feminists, writer Marianne Apostolides and visual artist  9 Catherine Mellinger, in their mixed-media text, Deep Salt Water, which is organized according to the weeks of a pregnancy and the aftermath of its termination. Rather than falling back into familiar polarizations for and against “choice,” they use the story of Apostolides’s abortion seventeen years earlier... (shrink)

This essay addresses the relationship between home, belonging and the maternal in feminist theory and fiction. Feminist discourse isoften typified by its critique of home: analysing the gendered assumptions underlying the depiction of home as nurturing, or exposing the regressive and essentialist connotations of the search for safe homes. A number of recent feminist theorists (Probyn, Bammer, Young) have, however, pointed to thepersistence of ‘retrograde’ desires for safety and belonging, particularly in an era of widespread dislocations. At the same (...) time, feminist critics such as Roberta Rubenstein have re-invoked the contested relationship between home and the maternal by arguing that the desire for home speaks to our earliest needs for security: a desire that ultimately maps on to a longing for the (idealized) mother as the ‘original safe home’ (Rubenstein, 2001). This essay draws upon the work of Rubenstein, Bammer and Young in order to examine the relationship between home and the maternal in a recent Irish novel, Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl. The plot of this novel, dealing with the events surrounding an incident of baby snatching, suggests both the persistence of (the maternal) home as a desire and the impossibility of identifying an original or authentic maternal/home. By exploring how the protagonists of this novel negotiate the demands and appeals of home and motherhood, this essay will ask to what extent it may be possible for feminism to recuperate, or re-envision, the maternal/home as utopian ideal. (shrink)

The complex world of motherhood is here unveiled. Covering issues ranging from whether we should occasionally lie to our children, to the unexpected challenges and complications of being a mother, _Motherhood - Philosophy for Everyone_ offers insightful, serious but often humorous essays that can be enjoyed by everyone - including husbands and fathers. Considers salient philosophical issues relating to pregnancy, birth, babycare, and raising a child Chapters include "The Days and Nights of a New Mother: Existentialism in the Nursery", (...) "The Media Proudly Presents: Lessons' from Celebrity Moms", and "The Off Button: Thought Experiments and Child Control" Contains work from diverse academic perspectives, including economics, psychology, education, English, sociology, women's studies, and theological studies, as well as from nurses and stay-at-home mothers Includes a foreword by Judith Warner, the New York Times columnist and author of _Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety_. (shrink)

A diagnosis of fetal abnormality presents parents with a difficult – even tragic – moral dilemma. Where this diagnosis is made in the context of surrogate motherhood there is an added difficulty, namely that it is not obvious who should be involved in making decisions about abortion, for the person who would normally have the right to decide – the pregnant woman – does not intend to raise the child. This raises the question: To what extent, if at all, (...) should the intended parents be involved in decision-making? In commercial surrogacy it is thought that as part of the contractual agreement the intended parents acquire the right to make this decision. By contrast, in altruistic surrogacy the pregnant woman retains the right to make these decisions, but the intended parents are free to decide not to adopt the child. We argue that both these strategies are morally unsound, and that the problems encountered serve to highlight more fundamental defects within the commercial and altruistic models, as well as in the legal and institutional frameworks that support them. We argue in favour of the professional model, which acknowledges the rights and responsibilities of both parties and provides a legal and institutional framework that supports good decision-making. In particular, the professional model acknowledges the surrogate's right to decide whether to undergo an abortion, and the intended parents' obligation to accept legal custody of the child. While not solving all the problems that arise in surrogacy, the model provides a framework that supports good decision-making. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper explores the ethics of post‐menopausal motherhood by looking at the case of Adriana Iliescu, the oldest woman ever to have given birth (so far 1). To this end, I will approach the three most common objections brought against the mother and/or against the team of healthcare professionals who made it happen: the age of the mother, the fact that she is single, the appropriateness of her motivation and of that of the medical team.

Discussion of the behaviour of pregnant women and mothers, in academic literature, medical advice given to mothers, mainstream media and social media, assumes that a mother who fails to do something to benefit her child is liable for moral criticism unless she can provide sufficient countervailing considerations to justify her decision. I reconstruct the normally implicit reasoning that leads to this assumption and show that it is mistaken. First, I show that the discussion assumes that if any action might benefit (...) her child, the mother has a defeasible duty to perform that action. I suggest that this assumption is implicitly supported by two arguments but that each argument is unsound. The first argument conflates moral reasons and defeasible duties; the second misunderstands the scope of a defeasible duty to benefit. This argument has important practical and theoretical implications: practically, it provides a response to a highly damaging discourse on maternal behaviour; theoretically, it provides the framework for a clearer understanding of the scope and nature of defeasible duties to benefit. (shrink)

The paper discusses the notion of authentic motherhood within the frame work of the traditional Yoruba-African society. It argues that an authentic mother, according to the traditional Yoruba-African understanding, is one who performs all her responsibilities as stipulated by the norms and precepts of society. It also points out that the responsibilities of an authentic mother are holistic in nature and when wholesomely fulfilled, have prudential, egoistic, and utilitarian justifications. The paper further provides a philosophical comparison of motherhood (...) in Yoruba-African and in Western understanding. The paper tries to establish that the Yoruba qualities of motherhood are essential to being a good mother no matter where in the world one lives, and irrespective of the culture one belongs to. It concludes that the Yoruba notion of authentic motherhood is relevant to the process of social reconstruction in the contemporary world. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary dialogue acts as a symbiosis for all the areas that participate and imply enormous projections for both art and science. This paper explores the potential of an interdisciplinary dialogue between Biology and Performance using as a case study the Performance Analfabeta created by the artist Paulina Bronfman. The work was shaped in the context of The Third Conference of the Nucleus of Artistic Research (NIA) of In/Inter/Disciplinary Laboratories hosted by the Faculty of Art of The Pontificia University of Chile (...) (LAB IID). The Lab was led by Chilean biologist Alejandra Zuñiga- Feest and the Brazilian artist Adriana Parente La Selva. This work aims to explore the questions: what does it mean, from the point of view of the arts and sciences, to develop an interdisciplinary laboratory? How is this done? This paper problematizes the creative process of collaboration between sciences and performance as well as the potential impact and link with society that this multidisciplinary dialogue can have. (shrink)

Motherhood, as it is practiced, constitutes an obstacle to gender equality in political participation. Several options are available as a potential solution to this problem. One is to advice women not to become mothers, or if they do, to devote less time and energy to caring for their children. However this will have negative repercussions for those who need to be cared for, whether children, sick people or the elderly. A second solution is to reject the view that political (...) participation is an important or necessary part of human flourishing, and allow that those who engage in caring activities can live good lives without having a say in how they are ruled. This has negative consequences for the carers who find themselves in a position, if not of direct oppression, of being dominated, and therefore susceptible of being oppressed. The solution I propose, inspired by the writings of Sophie de Grouchy, is that we look for a form of republicanism that regards caring activities as a form of political participation. (shrink)

Through an analysis of policy texts, population statistics and a targeted sample from the popular press, this paper both furthers knowledge about changing meanings of working motherhood in the contemporary US, and proposes a refinement to existing conceptual work relating to how wage-work and care-work are combined. I focus analysis on recent US social policy which grants new rights and protections for women seeking to combine lactation and wage-work (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2011). I critique (...) this policy through Bernise Hausman’s work on the politics of motherhood, arguing that it represents a form of work-life integration that is particularly burdensome for working mothers. I further argue that maternal practice as well as well as expectations of working motherhood in the contemporary US are being reshaped around the demands of neoliberalism, producing what I term ‘neoliberal motherhood’. I assert that this policy represents a way of combining wage-work and care-work that is not captured within existing feminist theory, and suggest that a re-working of theory in this area is needed in order to address cases in which embodied care-work is enfolded within the time and space of wage-work. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Moral Arguments against and for Surrogate Motherhood Legal Remedies for Surrogate Motherhood Perspectives of Health‐care Practitioners on Surrogate Motherhood Perspectives of Society on Surrogate Motherhood Conclusion.

In this paper we look at the implications of an emerging technology for the case in favor of, or against, postmenopausal motherhood. Technologies such as in vitro derived gametes have the potential to influence the ways in which reproductive medicine is practiced, and are already bringing new dimensions to debates in this area. We explain what in vitro derived gametes are and how their development may impact on the case of postmenopausal motherhood. We briefly review some of the (...) concerns that postmenopausal motherhood has raised—and the implications that the successful development, and use in reproduction, of artificial gametes might have for such concerns. The concerns addressed include arguments from nature, risks and efficacy, reduced energy of the mother, and maternal life expectancy. We also consider whether the use of in vitro derived gametes to facilitate postmenopausal motherhood would contribute to reinforcing a narrow, geneticized account of reproduction and a pro-reproductive culture that encourages women to produce genetically related offspring at all costs. (shrink)

I discuss two interrelated ways in which disgust functions in motherhood. First, relaxation of the mother’s sense of disgust allows her to nurture her child more effectively. Second, others’ responses of disgust are used to enforce social norms regarding the “good” mother. If the mother acquiesces, she must continually monitor and tidy her child, which may interfere with the child’s exploration of the world. If she does not, she is subject to ongoing signs that she is flawed or failing (...) as a mother. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that lesbian couples who wish to have children who are genetically related to both of them should be allowed access to mitochondrial replacement techniques. First, we provide a brief explanation of mitochondrial diseases and MRTs. We then present the reasons why MRTs are not, by nature, therapeutic. The upshot of the view that MRTs are non-therapeutic techniques is that their therapeutic potential cannot be invoked for restricting their use only to those cases where a mitochondrial (...) DNA disease could be ‘cured’. We then argue that a positive case for MRTs is justified by an appeal to reproductive freedom, and that the criteria to access these techniques should hence be extended to include lesbian couples who wish to share genetic parenthood. Finally, we consider a potential objection to our argument: that the desire to have genetically related kin is not a morally sufficient reason to allow lesbian couples to access MRTs. (shrink)

A scientist at Edinburgh University announced in 1994 that he had removed ovaries from, mouse fetuses and transplanted them, to adult mice. The ovaries released eggs, and conceptions occurred. Although this was not the first such attempt with mice, the study attracted attention because the researcher suggested, that fetal to adult ovarian transplants were a theoretical possibility for humans. If aborted, fetuses were used, as egg sources in assisted conception, a new entity would arise: the never-born genetic mother. Using eggs (...) from aborted fetuses for conception would lead to quixotic and novel family ties. Its use would echo surrogate gestational motherhood, in which a child has both a genetic mother who contributed her egg and a gestational mother who contributed her uterus for gestation and childbirth. With fetal egg use, however, the child's genetic mother would be a never-born fetus without sentience or known, physiology. (shrink)

This study examines how low-income African American mothers of children with sickle cell disease cope with the reproductive implications of having passed a genetic disease on to their children. Based on in-depth interviews with 29 African American mothers, I found that most mothers knew about SCD prior to having a child with the disease; many knew they were carriers of the sickle cell trait. In explaining why this knowledge did not lead them to alter their reproductive behaviors, mothers invoked a (...) theme of medical mismanagement; that is, they said the genetic screening programs for SCD did not provide them with enough medical knowledge about the disease. The implication that adequate knowledge about SCD would have affected their childbearing choices, however, is contradicted by their subsequent reproductive behaviors. I argue that the SCD diagnosis threatened motherhood, an important cultural value among low-income African American women, and that they protected their reproductive autonomy by obfuscating SCD medical knowledge. (shrink)

This essay argues that current advocacy of lesbian and gay rights to legal marriage and parenthood insufficiently criticizes both marriage and motherhood as they are currently practiced and structured by Northern legal institutions. Instead we would do better not to let the State define our intimate unions and parenting would be improved if the power presently concentrated in the hands of one or two guardians were diluted and distributed through an appropriately concerned community.

This article discusses the meanings that motherhood has in the everyday life of women in Sweden and how they practice their mothering. The empirical foundation is qualitative interviews conducted with mothers who live in Sweden. Social constructionist and discursive psychology inspired the article, and according to the analysis three discursive positions were identified. The first position deals with the child-mother relationship and indicates that the child's psychological well-being is dependent on the mother's accessibility. The second discursive position deals with (...) the child-mother-woman relationship. Within this framework, motherhood involves finding contentment in life beyond the child, to be able to convey that well-being to the child. The third discursive position focuses on the mother as a working woman rather than a mother. These three discursive positions are discussed in relation to a pronounced discourse within Swedish society, which centers on an intense politically induced struggle for gender equality. (shrink)

This article considers the impact of laws and policies that determine who experiences unplanned pregnancy, who has abortions, and how economic status shapes one's response to unplanned pregnancy. There is a well-documented correlation between abortion and poverty: poor women have more abortions than do their richer sisters. Equally well-documented is the correlation between unplanned pregnancy and poverty. Finally, the high cost of motherhood for poor women and their offspring manifests in disproportionately high lifelong rates of poverty, ill-health and mortality (...) for offspring and mothers, alike. Read together, these factors offer a vivid illustration of the medicalization of poverty. (shrink)

Modern belief revision theory is based to a large extent on partial meet contraction that was introduced in the seminal article by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson that appeared in 1985. In the same year, Alchourrón and Makinson published a significantly different approach to the same problem, called safe contraction. Since then, safe contraction has received much less attention than partial meet contraction. The present paper summarizes the current state of knowledge on safe contraction, provides (...) some new results and offers a list of unsolved problems that are in need of investigation. (shrink)

Surrogate motherhood-at least if carefully structured to protect the interests of the women involved-seems defensible along standard liberal lines which place great stress on free agreements as moral bedrocks. But feminist theories have tended to be suspicious about the importance assigned to this notion by mainstream ethics, and in this paper, we develop implications of those suspicions for surrogacy. We argue that the practice is inconsistent with duties parents owe to children and that it compromises the freedom of surrogates (...) to perform their share of those duties. Standard liberal perspectives tend to be insensitive to such considerations; we propose a view which takes more seriously the moral importance of the causal relationship between parents and children, and which therefore illuminates rather than obscures the stake that women and children have in surrogacy. (shrink)

Because it is often argued that surrogacy should not be treated as contractual, the question arises in which terms this practice might then be couched. In this article, I argue that a phenomenology of surrogacy centering on the notion of trust provides a description that is illuminating from the moral point of view. My thesis is that surrogacy establishes a complex and extended reproductive unit––the “surrogacy triad” consisting of the surrogate mother, the child, and the intending parents––whose constituents are bound (...) together by mutual trustful commitments. Even though a trust-based approach does not provide an ultimate answer to whether surrogacy should be sanctioned or prohibited, it allows for at least some practical suggestions. In particular, I will argue that, under certain conditions, surrogacy is tenable within familial or other significant relationships, and I will stress the necessity of acknowledging the new relationships and moral commitments that result from this practice. (shrink)

This chapter expresses that radical feminist perspectives on marriage and motherhood are in danger of being lost in the quest for equal rights. For more than a decade, feminist philosophers and lesbian/gay activists have been optimistic about the potentialities of legal marriage and legitimated motherhood. Feminist philosophers are taking as valuable theoretical paradigms for ethics many kinds of caring relationships that have been salient in women's lives. "Family" is itself a family resemblance concept. Apart from the institution of (...) marriage and historical ideals of the family, it is uncertain what characteristics mother‐child relationships would have, for many alternatives are possible. Historically, motherhood has been a core element of patriarchy. Moral philosophy might also be transformed by greater attention to the fact that adult experience and its potentialities are significantly conditioned by the childhoods of adults and of those children's relationships to adults. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between feminism, queer theory and the rise of popular debate over maternity and anti-maternity that has arisen in recent years in France. Through the image of ‘queer maternity’, that is to say, of women who question motherhood from the position of already having had children, the article tries to rethink the way in which feminism, queer theory and motherhood could be placed in relation to one another such that by questioning maternity, the symbolic (...) order that places motherhood on the side of the state and futurity can itself be questioned as a whole. This has particular resonances in the French context where a discourse of ‘natural’ motherhood has come to dominate: the ‘queer’ mother who questions her maternal status is thus argued to represent a threat to the futurity of the family, the social contract and the existing order. (shrink)

This paper considers the cause for canonization of Gianna Beretta Molla, a pediatrician who died in 1962 because during her pregnancy she refused medical treatment that would have caused her to abort. The acts of Gianna’s cause contribute to the creation of a specific example mirroring and sustaining the position adopted by the Church in the 1960s and 1970s in matters of abortion, motherhood, family, and right to life. These issues were particularly delicate in those years, when the Catholic (...) Church was facing the rise of liberal and radical positions that contrasted with its doctrine; in particular, law n. 194 of 22 May 1978 constituted the first act of abortion legalization in Italy. In this context, the sanctification of Gianna had strategic importance for the Church as a way of presenting the faithful with the Catholic ideal of motherhood through a concrete example to follow. In this paper, I argue that the way in which the figure of Gianna is represented in the acts of her cause for canonization can be read as the figurativization of the axiology laid out in more abstract terms in Church texts with a normative value, such as the constitutions it issued during the Second Vatican Council and other official documents expressing the pontifical magisterium. (shrink)

Leaving Safe Harbors offers radical readings of conventional literature, and makes creative use of philosophy, literature, film and popular culture as it maps out a future for progressive education. Award winning author Dennis Carlson re-scripts the myths embedded in the works of Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger and analyzes them alongside such popular phenomena as Ridley Scott's Bladerunner and the British Punk group, The Sex Pistols. In his fluid writing style, he lucidly illustrates how these modern "myths" may serve (...) as models for a new way to think about education, and breathes new life into canonical texts on learning. (shrink)

In her conceptualization of the human as defined by the capacity for revolt Kristeva unavoidably touches upon issues of robotization, technology, and the virtual. The concepts of animal and machine, however, although they do appear occasionally and in important ways, are never at the focus of her inquiries and are absent in her “New Forms of Revolt.” Yet these two concepts to a large extent define the field of contemporary philosophical debates of the human giving rise to three major theoretical (...) orientations. On the one hand, there is the trend which tries to come to terms with technological novelties and the merging of human and machine that they imply. This trend unfolds under the rubric of “transhuman” or “posthuman” and of the “enhancement” of man. The second trend predominates in animal studies. Mostly in an ethical perspective but also ontologically, this trend, to which Derrida’s later writing made a significant contribution, questions the idea of the “human exception” and the rigorous distinction between man and animal on which this exception rests. While apparently antagonistic, both trends align the human with the animal and oppose it to technology. The third trend collapses the distinctions on which the previous two rely through the lens of biopolitics: drawing on Heidegger, Kojève, and Foucault, it regards contemporary technological transformations as amounting to the animalization of man. The human disappears in the animal, in the machine, or in the indistinguishability of the two, confirming what Agamben has described as the inoperativeness of the anthropological machine. The present text turns to Kristeva’s conceptions of motherhood and revolt as introducing a powerful inflection in this tripartite field. Remarkably, it is precisely new sagas of rebellious machines like Battlestar “Galactica” that foreground the relevance of Kristeva’s approach. (shrink)

Common experiences of mothering offer profound critiques of maternal ethical norms found in both Christianity and Islam. The familiar responsibilities of caring for children, assumed by the majority of Christian and Muslim women, provide the basis for reassessing sacrificial and selfless love, protesting unjust religious and political systems, and dismantling romanticized notions of childcare. As a distinctive category of women's experience, motherhood may offer valuable perspectives necessary for remedying injustices that afflict mothers and children in particular, as well as (...) for developing cross-cultural understandings of justice in general. (shrink)

Safe-by-design aims at addressing safety issues already during the R&D and design phases of new technologies. SbD has increasingly become popular in the last few years for addressing the risks of emerging technologies like nanotechnology and synthetic biology. We ask to what extent SbD approaches can deal with uncertainty, in particular with indeterminacy, i.e., the fact that the actual safety of a technology depends on the behavior of actors in the value chain like users and operators. We argue that (...) while indeterminacy may be approached by designing out users as much as possible in attaining safety, this is often not a good strategy. It will not only make it more difficult to deal with unexpected risks; it also misses out on the resources that users can bring for achieving safety, and it is undemocratic. We argue that rather than directly designing for safety, it is better to design for the responsibility for safety, i.e., designers should think where the responsibility for safety is best situated and design technologies accordingly. We propose some heuristics that can be used in deciding how to share and distribute responsibility for safety through design. (shrink)

This essay presents a unified account of safety, sensitivity, and severe testing. S’s belief is safe iff, roughly, S could not easily have falsely believed p, and S’s belief is sensitive iff were p false S would not believe p. These two conditions are typically viewed as rivals but, we argue, they instead play symbiotic roles. Safety and sensitivity are both valuable epistemic conditions, and the relevant alternatives framework provides the scaffolding for their mutually supportive roles. The relevant alternatives (...) condition holds that a belief is warranted only if the evidence rules out relevant error possibilities. The safety condition helps categorise relevant from irrelevant possibilities. The sensitivity condition captures ‘ruling out’. Safety, sensitivity, and the relevant alternatives condition are typically presented as conditions on warranted belief or knowledge. But these properties, once generalised, help characterise other epistemic phenomena, including warranted inference, legal verdicts, scientific claims, reaching conclusions, addressing questions, warranted assertion, and the epistemic force of corroborating evidence. We introduce and explain Mayo’s severe testing account of statistical inference. A hypothesis is severely tested to the extent it passes tests that probably would have found errors, were they present. We argue Mayo’s account is fruitfully understood using the resulting relevant alternatives framework. Recasting Mayo’s condition using the conceptual framework of contemporary epistemology helps forge fruitful connections between two research areas—philosophy of statistics and the analysis of knowledge—not currently in sufficient dialogue. The resulting union benefits both research areas. (shrink)