I just heard that my abstract has been accepted for the Centre for Parenting Studies's one-day symposium "Feeding Children Inside and Outside the Home: Critical Perspectives" on 18th March. My paper, 'Infant Feeding Decisions and Philosophical Mistakes About Motherhood", connects moral pressure regarding infant feeding decisions to a mistaken assumption in discussions about maternal behaviour more generally:  that a mother who fails to do something to benefit her child is liable for moral criticism unless she can provide sufficient countervailing considerations to justify her decision.  This assumption contributes to a culture of pervasive guilt and self-sacrifice that undermines women’s emotional wellbeing and discourages pursuit of nondomestic goals.  There are lots other really exciting papers on the programme.  It looks like it will be a great day!

More London talks follow the week after this symposium.  On the evening of the 22nd, I'll be a speaker at the Forum for European Philosophy's event on the Philosophy of Pregnancy and Birth.

Then on the 23rd, it's time for our own workshop on the Breastfeeding Dilemma, bringing together academics, health professionals, parental support organisations and mothers to discuss how to support and encourage breastfeed without making those who decide not to breastfeed feel guilty or judged.  Registration for this workshop opened a couple of weeks ago and it has "sold out" (insofar as that is appropriate to describe a free event)! 

If you want to listen to me talk about philosophy, you can download free podcasts of my Philosophy Cafe talks here.

​It is a little difficult to see what is what, but my talks are:

09.How much must we give to Famine Relief?

19. Mistakes about motherhood.

​22. Does monogamy make sense?

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I'm a bit slow responding to the recent CDC advice that any woman of reproductive age not using birth control should avoid all alcohol.   

The awesome Rebecca Kukla responds at the bottom of this article: “We don’t tell pregnant women not to drive cars, even though we are much more certain that there’s a nonzero risk to their fetuses from each car ride than from each drink,” she said. “The ideal of zero risk is both impossible to meet and completely paralyzing to try to meet.”  Kukla argues that such guidelines are also excessively punishing. “The idea that the pleasures and routines that make up women’s days are mere luxuries that are not worth any risk whatsoever is patronizing and sexist,” she said. “And it would also turn their lives into complete hell if really taken to [its] conclusions.”

​There's also an interesting thread of Feminist Philosophers here.

I am extremely perturbed by this advice.  It looks to me like another example of the excessive policing of women's behaviour, assuming that a woman's life (whether she is pregnant or not) should be governed by her function as a baby incubator, and adopting an approach to risk which is totally at odds with our reasoning in other walks of life (i.e. all the stuff that our philosophy of pregnancy and motherhood work criticises).   I'm currently working with Elselijn Kingma on a paper arguing that in cases such as drinking alcohol during pregnancy we treat pregnant women as violating the strongest deontological constraint, the constrain against doing harm (rather than merely allowing harm or failing to benefit), but that deontological distinctions such as those between doing and allowing and harm versus benefit, do not apply easily to pregnancy.  These distinctions are at home when looking at interaction between two separate, clearly bounded individuals and that is not what you get in pregnancy.  This means that our characterisation of pregnant women's behaviour as doing harm (and our subsequent treatment of the women) is often unjustified.

However, in discussing this on social media, I have been told that the CDC is reacting to important new evidence and that although there are serious problems in the presentation of the advice, there may be something substantial here.  I haven't had time to explore this claim properly (son off nursery with bug, busy weekend with children, now playing catch up), so I'm officially withholding judgment until I know more.

We do need to remember that restrictions on the pregnant come at a cost even if it sounds like very little to ask.  Pregnant women aren't just asked to give up alcohol, they are told to watch their diet, to do neither too little nor too much exercise, to consider avoiding sunscreen "just in case", to avoid stress, ... The cumulative effect is exhausting.  

I am also worried about the emotional effect on women trying to get pregnant - perhaps for years - of being required to act as if they are pregnant.  I gave up everything when I was trying to conceive, from alcohol to omelettes, I even tried to get them to let me off going through the scanner at the airport.  (They refused.) Trying to becoming pregnant basically took over my life and I became very unhappy.  I know that I am not alone.  I worry that advice like this might make things worse.  I think we need to very clear on the risks before we endorse this kind of advice.