Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author's Introduction

• Consider the following philosophical question about pregnancy regarding the metaphysical relationship between the mother and the fetus: Is the fetus a part of, or contained by, the mother?
• An answer to this question will impact significantly on bioethical issues regarding reproduction, particularly surrogacy. Yet despite its impact, answers have been generally underexplored in metaphysics and presupposed in public policy. In this chapter I outline some answers and explore their relevance for policies on surrogacy. A surrogate mother, as defined in the United Kingdom, is someone who (a) gestates the fetus for, and may also (b) donate their egg to, the intended parent(s). The first, (a), is named a ‘host’ (or ‘full’) surrogate; the second, (b), is named a ‘straight’ (or ‘partial’) surrogate. Surrogacy potentially implies three physically and legally distinct mothers: (i) genetic; (ii) gestational; and (iii) social. Assuming these can be separated and embodied by different people, a host surrogate is a gestational mother, a straight surrogate is both a gestational and genetic mother, and an intended parent may be a genetic and social mother. At the center of what it is to be any type of surrogate mother is the notion of a gestational mother since this is the mother that is pregnant, and it is this pregnant relationship between mother and fetus that is of interest here.
• Since it is the metaphysics of pregnancy that I intend to apply to surrogacy, this chapter will focus on the metaphysical relationship specifically between the gestational mother in the surrogate arrangement and the fetus (regardless of whether the fetus is genetically related to the gestational mother, thus applying to both host and straight surrogates).1 This is because I am interested in what pregnancy is like per se, and I take for the purposes of this chapter that a surrogate is no less pregnant than any other gestational mother and that the genes of the fetus make no difference to this. I should note that when I speak of the fetus, I use the term loosely to generally refer to whatever the gestational mother is pregnant with at any time during the pregnancy, including the zygote, embryo, blastocyst, and so on. I also note that my discussion of the public policies on surrogacy is connected to the policies in the United Kingdom.
• Yet much of what I say can be generalized to policies elsewhere. The plan of the chapter is as follows: In the first section, I discuss surrogacy as a case of pregnancy. In the second section, I outline two metaphysical models of pregnancy — the Container model and the Parthood model. Then in the following sections, I apply these models to surrogacy, respectively, by assessing whether the conception of surrogacy utilizes the model and also by demonstrating what the conception of surrogacy would be like if the other model were utilized. The final section connects metaphysics with ethics and public policy and poses some methodological questions, before concluding.