•  231
    Breastfeeding and defeasible duties to benefit
    Journal of Medical Ethics 43 (8): 515-518. 2017.
    For many women experiencing motherhood for the first time, the message they receive is clear: mothers who do not breastfeed ought to have good reasons not to; bottle feeding by choice is a failure of maternal duty. We argue that this pressure to breastfeed arises in part from two misconceptions about maternal duty: confusion about the scope of the duty to benefit and conflation between moral reasons and duties. While mothers have a general duty to benefit, we argue that this does not imply a dut…Read more
  •  108
    Gestation and Parental Rights: Why is Good Enough Good Enough?
    Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 1 (1): 1-27. 2015.
    In this paper I explore the question of whether gestation can ground parental rights. I consider Anca Gheaus’s claim that the labour and bonding of gestation give one the right to parent one’s biological child. I argue that, while Gheaus’s gestational account of parental rights is the most successful of such accounts in the literature, it is ultimately unsuccessful, because the concept ‘maternal-fetal bonding’ does not stand up to scrutiny. Gheaus argues that the labour expended in gestation gen…Read more
  •  105
    Adoption is Not Abortion‐Lite
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 29 (1): 63-78. 2012.
    abstract It is standardly taken for granted in the literature on the morality of abortion that adoption is almost always an available and morally preferable alternative to abortion — one that does the same thing so far as parenthood is concerned. This assumption pushes proponents of a woman's right to choose into giving arguments that are based almost exclusively around the physicality of pregnancy and childbirth. On the other side of the debate, the assumption that adoption is a real alternativ…Read more
  •  73
  •  69
    Abortion, infanticide and moral context
    Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (5): 350-352. 2013.
    In ‘After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?’, Giubilini and Minerva argue that infanticide should be permitted for the same reasons as abortion. In particular, they argue that infanticide should be permitted even for reasons that do not primarily serve the interests (or would-be best interests) of the newborn. They claim that abortion is permissible for reasons that do not primarily serve the interests (or would-be interests) of the fetus because fetuses lack a right to life. They argue …Read more
  •  35
  •  34
    Whether it is morally permissible to compel women to undergo a caesarean section is a topic of longstanding debate. Despite plenty of arguments against the moral permissibility of a forced caesarean section, the question keeps cropping up. This paper seeks to scrutinise a particular moral argument in favour of compulsion: the appeal to parental obligation. We present what we take to be a distillation of the basic form of this argument. We then argue that, in the absence of an exhaustive theory o…Read more
  •  18
    Harm Reduction and Moral Desert in the Context of Drug Policy
    Health Care Analysis 28 (4): 362-371. 2020.
    The target of my discussion is intuitions lay people have about justice in the context of drug policy—intuitions that take on a more or less moral-desert-based shape. I argue that even if we think desert is the right measure of how we ought to treat people, we ought still be in favour of Harm Reduction measures for people who use drugs. Harm Reduction measures are controversial with members of the public, and much of the opposition seems to come from something like an appeal to a desert concepti…Read more