Valerie Williams

Scholars consider Mary Wollstonecraft an early feminist political theorist for two reasons: her explicit commitment to educational equality, and her implicit suggestion that the private‐sphere role of motherhood holds political import. My reading of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Womanuses Wollstonecraft's works and draws upon recent claims made by Sandrine Bergès inThe Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft to connect these points: educated women are better at performing motherly duties and, therefore, of greater benefit to society. Although many scholars have read Wollstonecraft's arguments for educational equality as a starting point for greater equality, Bergès does not. In this article, I further Bergès's claims and argue that Wollstonecraft's project is limited and likely to reinforce inequality between the sexes. Specifically, I show that Wollstonecraft's educational reforms incentivize women to become nothing more than highly educated housewives. In the process of fulfilling their social and political duty to instill public spirit and private virtue in future citizens, women are re‐entrenched in domestic affairs instead of being freed for public pursuits. This realization, I contend, should cause us to be wary of panaceas for women's subordination that rest on increasing their education.

In‐vitro fertilization clinics across the world currently use the body mass index (BMI) to assess risk for and determine access to in‐vitro fertilization (IVF); however, clinics vary widely in both setting specific BMI limits for access to IVF and articulating the reasons for their policies. Given that scholars have begun to question the usefulness of BMI for individual health risk assessment, it is striking that ethicists have not yet systematically evaluated the reasons given for using BMI in assessing individuals' risk in IVF treatments. In this paper, I provide the first systematic analysis of the chief arguments currently offered by IVF programs for using BMI as a criterion for risk assessment. Specifically, I articulate empirical concerns about the success of IVF in high‐BMI patients, practical concerns about the ability of high‐BMI patients to safely undergo procedures associated with IVF, and ethical concerns about the risk‐to‐reward ratio for high‐BMI patients and their potential children. I advance a series of objections to those arguments, using empirical data regarding IVF procedures and analogies with other high‐risk conditions including systemic lupus erythematosus, and science regarding the diagnosis of BMI‐correlated comorbidities such as high blood pressure or diabetes to argue that BMI alone is not a reasonable criterion for risk assessment in IVF; moreover, the usage of BMI may involve unacceptable violations of the bioethical principles of justice and respect for autonomy. Instead, I hold that IVF programs should rely on more precise laboratory and clinical measurements to evaluate risk in IVF.