Abstract

Heloise Robinson argues that by certain threshold criteria pregnant women qualify for a higher moral status by reason of their pregnancies. While her intention is to make this a status upgrade for women we worry that it may result in a status downgrade for women as a class, by presupposing and reinforcing women’s value in relation to their reproductive labor. Historically central to feminist analysis is resistance to reductive accounts of women in relation to their reproductivity. For example, Simone de Beauvoir addressed men’s transcendence and contrasted it with women’s immanence, a status distinction possible because women are mired in expectations that they will marry, produce children, and remain in the domestic realm. For her part, Shulamith Firestone argued that biological reproduction underlies women’s inferiority to men and that “The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both [should] be replaced by…artificial reproduction.” Her concern was to liberate women from expectations of biological reproduction so their productive value in society is not reduced to their reproductive contributions. A formidable body of analysis in this same vein cautions against collapsing the value of women into their pregnancies, so much so that some even commentators withdraw ‘mothering’ from gestation.