Carolyn McLeod

The process of adopting a child is “not for the faint of heart.” This is what we were told the first time that we, as a couple, began this process. Part of the challenge lies in fulfilling the licensing requirements for adoption, which, beyond the usual home study, can include mandatory participation in parenting classes. The question naturally arises for many people who are subjected to these requirements whether they are morally justified. This chapter tackles this question. It argues that, while strong reasons exist in favour of licensing adoptive parents, these reasons support the licensing not only of adoptive parents, but of all or some subset of so-called “natural” parents as well. The conclusion is that the status quo with respect to parental licensing, according to which only adoptive parents need to be licensed, is morally unjustified.

Philosophers have long recognized the value of trust for cooperation. They understand that being able to trust one another allows us to do what none of us could do singly and to do it efficiently, without constantly having to check up on one another. Some philosophers argue that the concept of trust could only have come about because of the human need to cooperate. They offer genealogies of trust that tie the concept to this need, and this need alone (Faulkner, 2007; Jones 2012, 2017; Simpson, 2012). I argue that the genealogy of trust is more complicated than this picture suggests. According to the view I defend, the concept answers to our need for belonging, not just our need for cooperation.

In this thesis. I give a theory of the nature of self-trust and an explanation of its role in autonomous decision-making. We tend to think of trust as essentially interpersonal which casts doubt on the coherence of the concept of self-trust. Drawing on patients' experiences in reproductive medicine. I argue that self-trust is a meaningful as well as a useful concept. I provide autobiographical sketches of a number of women's experiences. supplemented by my own observations made while doing a clinical practicum in reproductive medicine, to illustrate that what many women feel toward themselves in a variety of reproductive health care contexts is analogous to what we feel toward others when we trust and distrust them. I ground my theory of self-trust in an account of interpersonal trust, in which I draw on a number of theories of trust in ethics, especially those of Annette Baier and Karen Jones. The paradigm of trust in those theories is interpersonal, and I describe how self-trust and that paradigm are both alike and unlike one another in the following areas: what it is that we trust about ourselves/others when we are trusting, what kind of mental attitude trust is, and what constitute legitimate grounds for trusting. I use my theory of the nature of self-trust to understand the relation between autonomy and self-trust. I give a feminist analysis of that relation by showing how oppression can be a barrier to self-trust and hence, to autonomy. Lastly. I discuss the practical implications of the value of self-trust for the duty of health care providers to respect women's reproductive autonomy.

In order to protect children from risks associated with bad parenting, some philosophers have recommended that all parents be licensed, in much the same way in which drivers of motor vehicles and many professionals, such as physicians, are licensed. In this chapter, we clarify what parental licensing is, describe philosophical theories about it, and assess these theories in terms of how well they deal with problems of discrimination in parental licensing. While much of our discussion focuses on biologism, the privileging of biological parenthood over non-biological forms of parenthood, we also touch on other forms of discrimination that parental licensing can cause or exacerbate, such as classism, sexism, homophobia, racism, and ableism. Our view is that any adequate proposal in favor of parental licensing must take worries about discrimination seriously. Unfortunately, most philosophical proposals fail to do so.

This article aims to lay out the ‘for money’ and ‘for dignity’ arguments that feminist ethicists have given about the reproductive labour women perform in providing oocytes or in getting pregnant for others. Feminist arguments about the morality of these two practices overlap significantly because, from a feminist perspective, the morally relevant facts about them are quite similar. Still, there are dissimilarities, stemming from the obvious fact that one practice involves giving up oocytes while the other involves giving up a baby after a pregnancy. Some arguments by feminists reflect this core difference, in that they apply specifically to one practice but not to the other. The article highlights when the relevance of a particular argument differs for these different reproductive practices.

Feminist philosophers need a theory of distrust that can make sense of the institutional distrust that is common among people who face systemic oppression. Our purpose in this chapter is to lay the groundwork for such a theory. Our strategy is to use feminist insights about institutional distrust to critique the most general and well-developed theory of distrust in philosophy—Katherine Hawley’s commitment account—and to learn from this exercise about what a feminist theory of distrust should be like. Though not designed to explain institutional distrust as we understand it, Hawley’s theory is meant to apply to people’s relationships with institutional representatives as well as to friendships or intimate relationships whose contours are shaped by informal institutional structures. It should therefore be able to explain the institutional distrust that is prevalent among oppressed people. However, we argue that it falls short in this regard. The chapter ends with discussion about what our critique suggests about future directions for the feminist philosophy of distrust.

Some physicians in the United States have strong moral objections to the recent bans or near total bans on abortion in this country. The objections are particularly vehement among those who have been abortion providers. They are concerned about the impact of the new restrictions on patients—on their lives and health, especially patients who are socially marginalized and will not be able to travel to “friendly” states to have abortions (i.e., states that legally permit abortions). They are also worried about the status of women, which they fear will be unequal to that of men in a society where women are not permitted to make such intimate decisions about their lives. For these physicians, not to mention their patients, the bans on abortion are morally devastating. They, the physicians, might even feel compelled by their conscience to provide this care—to engage in what some call the “conscientious provision” of care—even though they could lose their careers and their freedom by doing so. There is currently no legal protection for the conscientious provision of abortion care in the U.S., although there is substantial protection for the conscientious refusal of that care. Physicians working in jurisdictions that have abortion bans put themselves at serious legal risk if they defy these bans for reasons of conscience. In general, their freedom of conscience is very low compared to that of physicians who conscientiously refuse to provide abortions in jurisdictions where abortions are still legal. Using theories of conscience and conscientious objection that I develop in Conscience in Reproductive Health Care (Oxford 2020), I argue that this situation is morally untenable.

Over the past decade, feminist philosophers have gone a long way toward identifying and explaining the phenomenon that has come to be known as epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice is injustice occurring within the domain of knowledge (e.g., knowledge production and transmission), which typically impacts structurally marginalized social groups. In this paper, we argue that, as they currently work, algorithms on social media exacerbate the problem of epistemic injustice and related problems of social distrust. In other words, we argue that algorithms on social media recreate and reify the conditions that lead to some groups being systematically denied the full status of knowers, thereby corrupting the epistemic terrain and, with it, systems of social trust and cooperation. We argue that algorithms do this in two ways—namely, via what we are calling algorithmic targeting and algorithmic sorting.

At the 2022 Central American Philosophical Association meeting, there was an Author-Meets-Critics session on Carolyn McLeod’s book, Conscience in Reproductive Health Care: Prioritizing Patient Interests. The event was organized and chaired by Heather Stewart and sponsored by the APA Committee on the Status of Women and Kate Norlock, chair of that committee. There were four speakers, including McLeod and three “critics”: Javiera Perez Gomez, Alison Reinheld, and Jennifer Parks, who were all generous enough to provide McLeod with their comments beforehand. The sessions occurred over Zoom even though some speakers were present in person at the conference. McLeod kicked things off by providing a summary of her book, which was then followed by critical comments by the critics in the order in which they’re named above. McLeod responded to their remarks and then Stewart led a Q&A session with our small but lively and intelligent audience. The content of what was said has been reproduced here.

The reproductive rights of women have been a central topic in feminist bioethics. The focus has been predominantly on the right not to reproduce, and so not to be subject to pronatalist social forces that make motherhood compulsory for women. That is the case despite many women and other members of marginalized groups experiencing anti-natalism, or in other words, social pressure to avoid biological reproduction. For these groups, the right to reproduce is as important, if not more important, than the right not to reproduce. This chapter concentrates on the right to reproduce and considers what form it should take in feminist bioethics. The main claim of the chapter is that feminists should ground the right in the need to protect marginalized groups from anti-natalism.

With the cure rate for many pediatric malignancies now between 70% and 90%, infertility becomes an increasingly important issue. Strategies for preserving fertility in girls and adolescent women occur in two distinct phases. The first phase includes oophorectomy and cryopreservation of ovarian cortex slices or individual oocytes; ultrasound-guided needle aspiration of oocytes, with or without in vitro maturation, followed by cryopreservation; and ovarian autografting to a distant site. The second phase occurs if the woman chooses to pursue pregnancy, and includes IVM of the oocytes, followed by in vitro fertilization and transfer of any created embryos to the woman's uterus. For ovarian autografting, the woman would undergo menotropin ovarian stimulation and retrieval of matured oocytes. The ethical challenges with each of these phases are many of fertility preservation and include issues of informed choice. The lack of proven benefit with these strategies and the associated potential physical and psychological harms require careful attention to the key elements of informed choice, which include decisional capacity, disclosure, understanding and voluntariness, and to the benefits of in-depth counseling to promote free and informed choice at a time that is emotionally difficult for the decision makers.

I want to get both personal and philosophical in this piece. I want to reflect on how my relationship with Sue Sherwin has fostered my own relational autonomy. At the same time, I want to discuss what theories of relational autonomy, like Sue's, add to the bioethics literature on autonomy. With this second objective, I hope to begin clearing up some confusion that I see in this literature about the nature of relational autonomy.Sue was my PhD supervisor, but more than that, she has been my mentor and my role model. I doubt I would still be part of the discipline of philosophy if it weren't for Sue. I came to Dalhousie University as a PhD student in 1995 with a burning love for philosophy but an intense dislike for...

Philosophical theories about parental licensing tend to pay insufficient attention to forms of discrimination that may be inherent in, or result from, a system of parental licensing. By situating these theories in relation to the status quo on parental licensing, we aim to show how many of them reinforce what philosophers have called “biologism”: the privileging of families formed through biological reproduction over families formed in other ways. Much of our discussion focuses on biologism, although we also touch on other forms of discrimination that parental licensing can cause or exacerbate, such as classism, sexism, homophobia, racism, and ableism. We firmly believe that any adequate proposal in favour of parental licensing must take worries about discrimination seriously. Unfortunately, most philosophical proposals fail to do so.

To a large extent, what we do and the circumstances we find ourselves in are beyond our control. Yet this fact presents a problem for the common view that we can be held responsible only for what we have direct control over. If we have control over very little, if anything at all, then to what extent can we be held responsible? A typical response by feminist philosophers is to accept the absence of control—or in other words, the presence of luck—but to insist that responsibility remains often enough. According to this view, where there is luck, there can also be responsibility. At the same time, feminists accept, of course, that where there is luck, there may not be responsibility. In general, like other philosophers, feminists have a complicated understanding of the relationship between luck and responsibility. In this chapter, we aim to describe how their understanding flows out of their feminist commitments and also what avenues there are for future research on luck and responsibility in feminist philosophy. Avenues that concern luck without responsibility are our central concern.