Episode 59: Quill Kukla discusses reproductive risk
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What personal experience led Rebecca Kukla to study reproductive risk?
Hey, Matt Teichman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask, if you're a fan of the show, to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. All right, thanks. Hello, and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from Evanston, Illinois. With us is Rebecca Kukla, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, where she's also a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. And she's here to talk with us about reproductive risk. Rebecca Kukla, welcome. Thanks. How did you come to be interested in this question of reproductive risk?
Well, I never particularly expected to be writing on reproduction, actually, as a philosopher until I got pregnant. I, before that, had interests, which it's now clear to me, in retrospect, are all interests that are circulating around these issues. But I was interested in social epistemology and in philosophy of science. I was also interested in the history of the body itself. and the way that our sense of identity partly comes from the kind of body we have and how that body is planted in our culture. All of those interests were already in place, but I didn't think of them as applied ethics interests particularly until I became pregnant. And when I did, I found myself in a completely unexpectedly bizarre world where, on the one hand,
It was strongly expected of me that I was going to be managing my every movement and every bodily gesture through a kind of lens of risk, where everything I did was to be framed as something that would make risks to my unborn baby either go up or down in some subtle way. And it was an entirely new way of moving through the world. to suddenly see myself as a risk manager with every bite of food I ate and with every product that I used on my hair and with every kind of exercise that I did or didn't do. And I became fascinated with that from the point of view of something like applied philosophy of science. How do we think about how science works? interjects itself into our bodies and into our lives.
At the same time, I got fascinated by the fact that as a pregnant woman, I was bombarded by this whole new set of images that were non-optional in a lot of ways. Ultrasound images of the inside of my body, pictures and advice books of what I was supposed to look like, how my body was supposed to be shaped, images that doctors wanted to show me of various DNA mutations and this, that, and the other. And I realized that I was coming to understand myself through this set of third-personally available, culturally available images, which were actually quite bizarre in a number of ways. And I got rhetorically fascinated with how those images were being used to shape my sense of self as a pregnant woman and somebody who's about to be a mother.
And frankly, I just felt like I couldn't help but write about it philosophically. I couldn't not interpret this as a philosophical issue. And that ended up starting what turned into what's now been more than 10 years of writing about these issues, even though I haven't been pregnant for a long time and no longer have an infant.
So one particular example of something that you've written about is a law in California that's known as Proposition 65. So maybe you could just explain in basic terms what is that law? What does it mandate?
Yeah, sure. It's a fascinating law that has gotten, interestingly, virtually no attention from scholars and virtually no attention from bioethicists or other kinds of practical ethicists. It's a law that dates back from the 80s, and the essence is... that businesses and makers of products and owners of public spaces either have to prove that their product or space falls below an incredibly, incredibly low threshold for presence of toxic chemicals for now close to a thousand different substances. And these are chemicals that are either theorized or have been shown to pose some amount of reproductive risk, although sometimes it's very tenuous, the evidence.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What personal experience led Rebecca Kukla to study reproductive risk?
0:00–6:45
2
How does pregnancy turn everyday actions into a constant risk‑management exercise?
6:45–25:42
3
What is California’s Proposition 65 and how does it label products as reproductive‑risk hazards?
25:42–33:21
4
Why do Prop 65 warnings fail to give pregnant women useful information for decision‑making?
33:21–36:51
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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