Christine Overall

This paper will explore some moral and conceptual aspects of the practice of surrogate motherhood. Although I put forward a number of criticisms of existing ideas about this subject, I do not claim to offer a fully developed position. Instead what I have tried to do is to call into question what seem to be some generally accepted assumptions about surrogate motherhood, and to lend plausibility to my view that surrogate motherhood may be morally troubling for reasons not always fully recognized by other writers on this issue. These reasons go beyond the fairly obvious consequentialist concerns about its effects on the persons - particularly the child — involved. A concern for the well being of a child produced by a surrogate is, I believe, entirely justified, but my focus in this paper will be upon the surrogate mother herself.

As a university professor, an environmentalist, and a world-traveller, Sue Hendler was thriving. Then she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. She had to give up her job, make hard decisions about medical treatment, and drastically shorten her vision of the future. As her cancer spread, she ironically acquired a new identity as a cancer "survivor." Compelled to find meaning in her "new normal" of life with a fatal disease, she decided to write for a wider audience. In Dying in Public: Living with Metastatic Breast Cancer, Hendler talks about her experiences of undergoing surgery, taking steroids, receiving chemotherapy, and enrolling in a clinical drug trial. As her condition worsens she remains committed to living fully. She struggles with writing a bucket list, discusses her "legacy," and talks about her feelings of anger and the importance of love. She also describes how she lived, towards the end, with the support of the members of her "Care Team," a group of over thirty friends, family, and health care workers who enabled her to remain at home until the day before her death. This honest, witty, and unsentimental depiction of "dying in public" is a profound tribute to a life well lived.

In the philosophy of mysticism, an important and foundational problem concerns the nature of mystical experience. The problem is both significant and basic because an understanding of the nature of mystical experience is a necessary precondition for the evaluation of its epistemological, ontological, and ethical significance, and will in fact influence that evaluation. In other words, our ideas about the nature of mystical experience are premises for our conclusions about the role of mystical experience in human knowledge, about the ‘object ’, if any, of mystical experience, and about the value and moral implications of mystical experience

A serious moral weakness of reproductive ‘surrogacy’ is that it can be harmful to the children who are created. This article presents a proposal for mitigating this weakness. Currently, the practice of commercial ‘surrogacy’ operates only in the interests of the adults involved , not in the interests of the child who is created. Whether ‘surrogacy’ is seen as the purchase of a baby, the purchase of parental rights, or the purchase of reproductive labor, all three views share the same significant flaws. They endorse the transfer, for a fee, of the infant from the woman who gestated it to those who commissioned it, but without justifying such a transfer; they fail to demonstrate that the commissioners have any entitlement to the infant, or, for that matter, suitability to be the infant's parents; and they fail to take any notice of the infant's needs, interests, and wellbeing. A mere genetic connection is not enough to establish that the commissioners are entitled to receive the baby or that they are competent to raise it. Their good intentions, however caring, are not enough. Therefore, just as in the practice of adoption, there should be a formal institutionalized system for screening and licensing the prospective social parents, which would make the infant's needs, interests, and wellbeing paramount. I reply to several potential objections to this proposal, including the objection that genetic parents who raise their own child are not screened and licensed

Our universities are the locus of ongoing debates over the politics of gender, of class, of disadvantage and disability—and over the issue of “political correctness.” In _A Feminist I_ Christine Overall offers wide-ranging reflections from a first-person point of view on these issues, and on the politics of the modern university itself. In doing so she continually returns to underlying epistemological concerns. What are our assumptions about the ways in which knowledge is constructed? To what degree are our perceptions shaped by our social roles and identities? In the past generation feminists have led the way in recognising the importance of such questions, and recognising too the ways in which personal experience may be an invaluable reference point in academic theory and practice. But reliance on personal experience is fraught with problems; how is one to deal with tensions between the autobiographical and the analytic? This book points the way to resolving some of those tensions, and to fruitfully sustaining others. It is a book of considerable insight, warm humanity, and genuine importance.

Reproductive technology has become virtually synonymous with new reproductive choices for women. We are led to believe these technological practices will primarily enable women to conceive and bear the children they previously could not. The presentation of this as fact urges us to support the advancement of reproductive technology so that future techniques may be perfected. The Future of Human Reproduction critically assesses the social, moral, legal, and political impact of reproductive technology on women's lives. Through a feminist analysis, writers explore how the implications of technology are much more complex and far reaching than we think. The writers uncover a number of issues that need to be addressed and challenged rather than assume reproductive technology is being pursued safely and in the best interests of all women.

This paper explores, from a feminist perspective, the justification of major surgical reshaping of the body. I define “transracialism” as the use of surgery to assist individuals to “cross” from being a member of one race to being a member of another. If transsexualism, involving the use of surgery to assist individuals to “cross” from female to male or from male to female, is morally acceptable, and if providing the medical and social resources to enable sex crossing is not morally problematic, then transracialism should be morally acceptable, and providing medical and social resources to facilitate race crossing is not necessarily morallyproblematic. To explore this idea, I present and evaluate eight possible arguments that might be given against accepting transracialism, and I show that each of them is unsuccessful.

: Public toilets are a key part of the urban environment. This paper examines and evaluates the pervasive sex segregation, throughout North America, of public toilets. The issue is situated within a larger context—the design and management of the urban environment; larger assumptions about sexuality, reproduction, and privacy that govern that environment; and continuing compulsory sex identification and segregation which still define key areas of "public" space. I examine seven groups of arguments in favor of sex segregation, arguing that all of them are inadequate. I then present reasons showing why ending the sex segregation of public toilets is justified