Abstract

The ‘containment view’ of pregnancy is widely held, but it has recently been subjected to sustained criticism by Elselijn Kingma. According to the containment view, human foetuses (among others) are animals in their own right, contained within their mothers. Kingma's alternative to this is the ‘parthood view,’ according to which a foetus is a maternal part. Despite the prevalence of the containment view, there are not a great many arguments in its favour, and Kingma has searchingly criticized several of these. In this paper, I defend an argument for the containment view, which I think is not undermined by Kingma-type considerations.