Pregnancy, Caregiving, and a Supposed Obligation to Gestate

Abstract

Many people – including many feminists – believe both of the following: (i) abortion is morally permissible regardless of the moral status of the fetus (at least for most of a pregnancy) and (ii) members of society have a shared, moral obligation to provide care for dependents. Yet it has been argued that the shared, moral obligation of members of society to care for dependents entails that women may be morally obligated to gestate unwanted fetuses. Central to this argument is that fetal dependency is relevantly similar to (other) persons' dependency on care and that pregnancy itself is a kind of caregiving. We think this argument is erroneous and politically dangerous. To expose its faults, we engage in a philosophical analysis of pregnancy: how to understand it, how it differs from caregiving, how it is inherently risky, how fetal development is by its nature invasive, and why all this matters for the ethics and politics of abortion.