By J. Y. Lee. “A South Korean firm is offering to pay its workers $75,000 each time they have a baby,” a recent news headline reads. Pronatalist incentives are not new in South Korea; the South Korean government has spent 270 billion dollars since 2006 in effort to promote childbirth and reverse declining fertility rates. […]
Category: Reproduction
Medical authority and expectations of conformity: undermining person-centred maternity care
By Anna Nelson. There is an ongoing ‘maternity crisis’ in the UK, and too many women and birthing people face barriers to accessing respectful, person-centred maternity care. Charities, campaigners and journalists continue to emphasise the consequences of this state of affairs, both for individuals and for society more widely. Individuals may experience harm to their […]
Terms of cervix: IUD trials as a condition of elective sterilisation
By Teresa Baron. Getting your tubes tied is no easy feat. Plenty has been said in recent years about barriers to elective sterilisation, and persuading a doctor to do the deed is a particularly difficult for young, child-free women. If a woman has a long-term partner, her practitioner will often encourage her to see if […]
China’s National Health Commission bans single women from freezing eggs: with or without legal and ethical justifications?
By Hao Wang. Theresa Xu, ‘the first Chinese single woman to sue for her right to freeze eggs,’ lost her lawsuit last year. In 2020, Xu, then 30, sought to freeze eggs in a hospital in Beijing. Xu was not ready to be a mother then, but thought she might want to be one in the future. Therefore, she […]
Meet the elite couples who miss the point entirely!
By Richard B. Gibson. As many may have seen, the Telegraph recently featured an article on pronatalism. Simply put, pronatalism is the idea that our future – family groups, specific sectors of society, iterations of our global civilisation, or our very species – depends on people having enough children to ensure a growing population. Without […]
The furore around whole bodily gestational donation: a tale of misplaced anger?
By Anna Nelson. Prompted by a sensationalist headline in the Daily Mail, there has been a furore on social media around an article published last year by bioethicist Anna Smajdor in which she defends ‘Whole Bodily Gestational Donation’ (WBGD). Put simply WBGD means that, with prior consent, the bodies of women in a permanent vegetative […]
What’s the big deal with ‘whole body gestational donation’? On defending bioethics
By J. Y. Lee. Over the past week, a flurry of articles on the internet (for example: 1, 2, 3) sensationalized the contents of a journal article published by philosopher Anna Smadjor, on what she calls “Whole body gestational donation” – with discussants on social media largely condemning the proposed concept, and implying that “bioethics” […]
Children into this world? Really?
By Matti Häyry. People have children for various reasons. Some of these concentrate on anything but the child. God demands it, nature requires it, society needs it, family and friends wish it, people themselves want it. Others focus on the children. They would have a good life, a good-quality life, a life worth living, and […]
Fetal alcohol syndrome and abortion
By Simon Cushing In several publications, the philosopher Perry Hendricks has pushed an argument that he calls “the impairment argument,” intended to demonstrate that our horror at causing impairments such as fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) to our children in utero should lead us to regard abortion with at least equal horror, as surely death is […]
Getting “done” for concealment of pregnancy: Does a woman have a duty to inform healthcare staff of her pregnancy status?
By Gemma McKenzie. In England a pregnant woman – like any adult with mental capacity – enjoys the rights to autonomy and bodily integrity. As a result, she can only be subjected to a medical intervention with her informed consent. The law does not consider a human fetus as a separate legal entity; therefore, a […]