[Note: This page is mostly aimed at professional philosophers. If you are interested in my work on infant feeding but this page makes no sense to you, you may wish to go here.]
A recurring mistake influences discussion of the behaviour of pregnant people and mothers (or those who are assumed to be mothers). The mistake in question is the assumption that a mother who fails to do something that might benefit her child must be able to provide over-riding countervailing considerations to justify her decision. It is assumed that in the absence of such a justification the mother is liable for moral criticism. We see this assumption operating in academic literature, medical advice given to (those assumed to be) mothers, mainstream media and social media.
I argue that this mistaken assumption involves attributing to the mother a defeasible duty to perform each action that might benefit her child. This attribution is supported by implicit appeal to two arguments, both of which are initially appealing but ultimately unsound.
This project has now evolved into 'How To Be a Good Mother: an emancipatory account of motherhood and maternal duties.' My previous work on motherhood and mistakes about defeasible duties to benefit was negative, arguing that we should reject over-demanding models of maternal duties. In this new project, I aim to give a positive account of what makes a parent count as a mother and what mothers are required to do for their children. This involves first producing the first fully articulated moderate account of gender-neutral parental duties, then producing an emancipatory account of what makes a parent count as a mother, then drawing these two subprojects together to make sense of distinctively maternal duties.
Motherhood and Defeasible Duties to Benefit Publications
My first paper on this topic, which lays out the general philosophical issues is called 'Motherhood and Mistakes about Defeasible Duties to Benefit'. It has been published at Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. If you don't have access to PPR, you can download a author's draft of the paper at Publications and Works in Progress.
The following papers draw on and extend these ideas:
“Do Mothers of Extremely Preterm Babies Have a Duty to Express Breastmilk?” Acta Paediatr. Accepted Author Manuscript. doi:10.1111/apa.15323 “Requirements to Justify Breastfeeding in Public: A philosophical analysis” International Breastfeeding Journal, 14, 2019. Article number: 26. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13006-019-0217-x
For links to blogs and other pieces about how mistakes about defeasible duties link to guilt and shame surrounding infant feeding decisions, see my page on Philosophy and How Babies Are Fed.
The following are some key papers responding to my work:
This project on motherhood and mistakes about defeasible duties to benefit began life as part of a series of projects on Philosophy of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood at the University of Southampton, run by Elselijn Kingma and Fiona Woollard.