McKercher Lecture: Pregnancy, Personhood, and the Equality of Women
General Guest Speakers
Assistant Professor Heloise Robinson of the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia will explore whether there could be reasons to recognize a distinct category of moral and legal personhood for pregnant women.
Event Details
When:
Time: noon–1 pm
Location: MLT Aikins Lecture Theatre (Room 150), College of Law, 15 Campus Drive
Speaker: Assistant Professor Heloise Robinson, Assistant Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
It is perhaps not surprising that there have been, amongst philosophers and in some areas of law, extensive debates on the personhood, status, or categorization of the fetus; in an important case in the House of Lords, the fetus was described as a “unique organism.”
However, in these debates the fetus is usually examined in isolation, as if it is an entirely separate entity. This is in line with a containment view of pregnancy. If we reject this view, and accept that the fetus is part of the pregnant body, it seems that we need to ask a different question about categorization: instead of asking “what is the fetus,” we need to ask “what is the pregnant woman.”
Based on the recognition that pregnancy itself is unique, and that the pregnant woman has a unique bodily state, there could be reasons to recognize a distinct category of moral and legal personhood for the pregnant woman herself. This category could call for a distinct approach in certain areas of law, and for some additional rights.
In this presentation, Heloise Robinson will explore this argument, and many of its potential implications, including in relation to the doctor-patient relationship, maternal-fetal conflicts, violence against pregnant women, assisted reproduction, and parental rights. She will also propose that this approach to personhood could be a requirement to achieve genuine gender equality.
This event is part of the McKercher Lecture Series.
About the speaker:
Heloise Robinson is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law, at the University of British Columbia. Previously, she taught at the University of Oxford, including as the Singer Fellow in Law at Exeter College. She holds a DPhil in Law from Oxford, and first studied law at McGill University. Her research is on law and philosophy, with a primary focus on issues pertaining to bioethics, disability, feminist legal theory, and tort law.
She is the author of Selecting against Disability in the Liberal State: Choice, Equality, and the Limits of Neutrality (Cambridge University Press, 2026), and is one of the editors of the forthcoming book Philosophical Foundations of Disability Law (Oxford University Press). She is also now working on a third book, where she is developing a new argument on the status of pregnant women.
Prior to moving into academia, she completed a clerkship with Mr. Justice Marc Nadon at the Federal Court of Appeal, interned at the ICC International Court of Arbitration in Paris, and worked in large corporate law firms in Montreal and London.