Pregnancy, Personhood, and the Equality of Women

Pregnancy presents a serious challenge to our approach to personhood and equality. We normally think that “one equals one”: each person is equal to every other person. But in pregnancy we do not clearly have only “one” person, even if we do not think that the fetus is a person. Indeed, if we think that the fetus is part of the pregnant woman’s body, and if we reject a containment view of pregnancy, we might need to take a different approach. While we have debated at length the moral status or personhood of the fetus, this talk will examine a different question entirely: the personhood of the pregnant woman. If we think that pregnancy is a unique form of bodily existence, with a higher moral value, there may be reasons to recognise that a pregnant woman has a unique form of personhood, calling for a stronger set of rights. This recognition could also have important practical implications in many areas, including with respect to maternity care, maternal-fetal conflicts, sexual violence, surrogacy, and artificial gestation technologies. It might also be necessary so that we can achieve genuine gender equality.

In this talk, the author will discuss her work in progress in relation to her development of a new argument about the status of pregnant women. Some initial elements of this argument have already been published in a Feature Article in the Journal of Medical Ethics (‘Pregnancy and superior moral status: a proposal for two thresholds of personhood’). The author will also discuss how she is now working on developing the argument further in a book.

Optional pre-reading:

Heloise Robinson, 'Pregnancy and superior moral status: a proposal for two thresholds of personhood' (2024) 50 J Med Ethics (2024) 12

About the speaker

Dr Heloise Robinson is a Stipendiary Lecturer in Law at St Hugh’s, and previously worked as a Lecturer or as a Fellow at other Oxford colleges. During the 2025-2026 academic year, she is also an Academic Visitor at the Uehiro Oxford Institute, where she is conducting research on applied ethics. Her main interests relate to medical law and bioethics, disability law and philosophy, equality, and feminist legal theory. She is also a qualified barrister and solicitor in Ontario, Canada, and prior to starting her academic work practised law for some years.

Her work has been published in leading generalist law and bioethics journals, including the Modern Law Review, Legal Studies, the Journal of Medical Ethics (including a Feature Article), and the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. Much of her current research examines legal and ethical questions surrounding the use of techniques to select against disability, and she is the author of Selecting against Disability in the Liberal State (under contract with CUP), and one of the editors of Philosophical Foundations of Disability Law (with Jonas-Sébastien Beaudry and Jonathan Herring, under contract with OUP). She has also written on stigma theory and human rights, on the relationship between offensive speech and free speech, and has edited a journal Special Issue, following on from a conference she convened in Oxford.

She has also recently published a new argument on personhood and the status of pregnant women, and she is now developing the argument further in a monograph, provisionally titled Pregnant Personhood: An Argument About Equality (under contract with OUP).