You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Commentary
Justice for women/gestators: superior personhood or plain old feminism?
  1. Amanda Roth
  1. Philosophy, SUNY Geneseo, Geneseo, New York, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Amanda Roth, Philosophy, SUNY Geneseo, Geneseo, New York, USA; rothal{at}geneseo.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/jme-2023-109492

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Robinson offers the ‘superior personhood’ approach (SPA) to capture the value of gestation and ground justice for women/gestators.1 SPA holds that women/gestators are more than mere persons given the reality of pregnancy and the vital role women/gestators play in reproduction.1 In this commentary, I speak to some background context perhaps relevant to SPA, lay out areas of agreement with Robinson and then raise four worries about the approach. In my view, the devaluing of gestation and injustice for women/gestators need rectifying, but SPA is not the way.

    (My) background context: abortion

    It is difficult not to read Robinson’s piece through the lens of 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision and the politics of abortion, with its focus on fetal status. This background offers a certain kind of sympathetic strategic/rhetorical reading of the motivation for SPA—one to which I found students and others with whom I discussed the piece quite open. Perhaps the goal here is to offer an ingenious defence of abortion rights: if women/gestators are more than one person, then the immorality of abortion cannot be easily grounded in claims about fetal personhood.2

    However, Robinson downplays abortion, affirming only ‘my approach could support a wide range of positions on abortion’. This is curious. Is SPA compatible with significant restrictions on abortion? Assuming a realistic political context, this would involve mere persons (men/non-gestators) legislating how superior persons can …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors AR is solely responsible for writing this commentary,

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    • ↵I will employ ‘women/gestators’ to keep in view women, trans men/trans masculine people and non-binary individuals capable of gestation.

    • ↵Importantly, as has been regularly pointed out in the philosophical literature, nor can fetal personhood establish abortion’s immorality even if women/gestators are only mere persons, given the intimacy and burdens of the gestator-fetus relation.

    • ↵Importantly, as has been regularly pointed out in the philosophical literature, nor can fetal personhood establish abortion’s immorality even if women/gestators are only mere persons, given the intimacy and burdens of the gestator-fetus relation.

    Linked Articles

    Other content recommended for you