What happens to our laws about pregnancy, parenthood, and abortion when “gestation” can be shared, transferred, or even moved outside the human body by new biotechnology?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Elizabeth Chloe Romanis is Associate Professor in Biolaw in the Durham Law School as well as in the Durham Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences, and her work focuses on healthcare law and bioethics.
Check out her book!
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/biotechnology-gestation-and-the-law-9780198873785
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198873786
2. Book Summary
In Biotechnology, Gestation, and the Law, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis argues that debates about reproduction are often built on shaky concepts, and that this matters once new technologies make “ordinary” assumptions about pregnancy and birth start to wobble. A central move is to separate pregnancy (a state of being) from gestation (a generative process), and to show how legal thinking slides between incompatible pictures, sometimes implicitly treating the fetus as part of the pregnant person, but more often treating the pregnant person as a “container.” This conceptual work is not just metaphysical housekeeping: it exposes the background assumptions that structure current legal schemas and shape how people’s lives are regulated.
Building on that foundation, Romanis proposes treating “technologies enabling gestation” as a genus that includes surrogacy, uterus transplantation (UTx), and ectogestation, and she argues that the law’s focus on “assisted conception” is a poor fit for regulating this very different procreative enterprise. She then tracks how existing frameworks can blunt the technology’s transformative potential by trying to force new modalities of gestation to mimic “natural” procreation, a pattern tied to deeper forms of biological essentialism and a tendency to privilege the binary, two-parent nuclear family. On sex and gender, she argues that these technologies can be equality-enhancing for marginalized groups, but that it is a mistake to treat them as a simple “solution” for women’s equality; the more radical potential lies in “unsexing” generative labour and disrupting the assumption that gestation is inherently female.
Later chapters apply this framework to parenthood and abortion. Romanis examines why gestation has been used to anchor legal motherhood, and how that rationale becomes unstable once gestational work can be divided across people and machines (as in partial or complete ectogestation), creating new puzzles about who counts as a legal parent and when parental rights and responsibilities should begin. She emphasizes the importance of keeping clear boundaries that protect pregnant people, including carefully distinguishing entities undergoing extra-uterine gestation from fetuses, precisely to avoid expanding fetal-centred regulation of pregnancy. Finally, she argues that technologies enabling gestation do not change the morality of abortion when the harms of unwanted pregnancy are centred, but they are likely to generate politically motivated pressures on abortion provision because much ectogestation literature frames abortion as “the problem” rather than recognizing it as a response to unwanted pregnancy.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:03 - Overview
02:43 - Pregnancy vs. gestation
05:50 - Conceptual engineering
08:19 - Fetal relationship
13:13 - Legal metaphysics
14:43 - Gradual part-whole views
19:22 - Biotech and gestation
22:39 - Social and legal issues
25:59 - Uterus transplants
30:23 - Social narratives
36:44 - Biological essentialism
42:50 - Legal motherhood
49:03 - Biotech and abortion
58:53 - Abortion and metaphysics
01:01:04 - Reforming abortion law
01:11:36 - Value of philosophy
01:14:16 - Conclusion
