Episode 139: Jessica Tizzard discusses the philosophy of pregnancy
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What is the central philosophical question about pregnancy that the episode introduces?
Hello
and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Jessica Tizard, Assistant Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, and she is here to discuss the philosophy of pregnancy. Jessica Tizard, welcome back to Elucidations.
Thank you. It's great to be back.
A lot of people might wonder why we're doing an episode on pregnancy. Like, isn't pregnancy pretty straightforward? Don't we know what it is? You know, a fetus gestates inside a pregnant person for a given period of time that gets born. Isn't this all something that we kind of like biologically understand pretty well?
Yeah, right. You might think this is an area that needs to be investigated by science. And we might need to still do some ethical reasoning about pregnancy. But yeah, in terms of metaphysics, it's pretty simple and there's nothing more to ask about. I think for a long, long time, we took this for granted, even in academic philosophy, even in professional centers for philosophy, but that's changing. And people are making good arguments that there are lots of reasons to think that we do have theoretical views on pregnancy and that we take them for granted and we implicitly adopt philosophical attitudes towards the phenomenon of pregnancy. And most importantly, the relationship between the pregnant person and
and the developing fetus. So it actually is a really good arena for doing philosophical inquiry.
So what if I just said that, look, pregnancy is simple. Being pregnant is just having a baby growing inside you. What's wrong with that? Are there some implicit assumptions that I'm making that maybe, is there like an implicit theory that I'm assuming in saying that?
Yeah, well, one thing to say is that a fetus is not a baby. If we think about what a fetus is like and what a baby is like, they're very, very different things. And we can say this, of course, biologically and medically, but there are further arguments that they're even very different things from a metaphysical perspective in terms of philosophical questions about whether a fetus is an individual, how a fetus relates to the person that is pregnant with it. So yeah, so I think the thing that we implicitly assume if we say that a fetus is just inside a pregnant person is that they are two separate entities, the fetus and pregnant person, and that the pregnant person simply contains the fetus, which is a distinct individual.
which is more or less the same as a baby, but just happens to be contained inside of the pregnant person. And so this philosophers now identify as the container model of pregnancy. And this is the type of thing that we're now in a position to question.
Yeah, okay, good. So maybe implicit in the way I stated that, when I said, Oh, being pregnant is when you have a baby growing inside you. That was kind of running roughshod over the distinction between a baby who like, I don't know, cries and breathes and talks and does all kinds of things distinctive of babies, and a fetus who doesn't do any of those things. What I kind of skipped over maybe in my description, was that when birth takes place, there's a real transformation that happens.
Yes, I think that's a good way of putting it. So one thing that philosophers working in this area say now is it's a mistake to think that birth is just a change of location. If we actually look at the science and think philosophically about what we know about pregnancy, we'll see that, yes, something more like a transformation is taking place.
How do the ‘container’ and ‘parthood’ models differ in describing the fetus‑pregnant person relationship?
We could even put it in terms of one thing becoming two.
Ah, interesting. Okay. Yeah. Like the person's dividing or something like a cell dividing.
Right. Like an amoeba. Yeah.
So it seems like we have two different theoretical models for the relationship between the pregnant person and the fetus. One of them is a container model where the fetus is sort of like inside the pregnant person, the way they might be inside a room or an apartment or a cave. They're like contained in them. The other one is this idea that, well, really like before birth, we have kind of like one person and then that person kind of bifurcates into two people at birth.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central philosophical question about pregnancy that the episode introduces?
0:09–4:02
2
How do the ‘container’ and ‘parthood’ models differ in describing the fetus‑pregnant person relationship?
4:02–6:59
3
Why does the “bun in the oven” metaphor fall short for understanding pregnancy?
6:59–10:02
4
What biological facts support the view that a fetus is a part of the pregnant person’s body?
10:02–14:16
5
How does the parthood model change the moral discussion about abortion and maternal autonomy?
14:16–17:59
6
What ethical challenges arise when imagining gestation in artificial wombs or machines?
17:59–22:50
7
What policy‑level actions do the speakers suggest to better support pregnant people?
22:50–26:52
8
How do the guests summarize the practical implications of re‑thinking pregnancy metaphors?
26:52–31:40
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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