Bio: Blair Donohue is a direct-entry midwife, full spectrum doula, and reproductive anthropologist. She has worked as a midwife in a variety of clinical contexts including at a busy freestanding birth center on the Texas-Mexico border, at a government-run maternity clinic in Cameroon, at a private hospital in India, and at a migrant women’s health center in northern Morocco. Her academic scholarship focuses on the cultural production of knowledge about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood.
Abstract:
The maternal-fetal conflict (MFC) paradigm has been the standard in obstetrical moral reasoning since the late 1970s. Within the MFC paradigm, the mother and the fetus are perceived as separate individuals with separate needs and separate rights. While many bioethicists and birth workers have attempted to “solve” the MFC—to reason out a method of balancing moral obligations to the mother with moral obligations to the fetus—far fewer have questioned the merits of the framework itself. In this paper, I argue that the two-patient, conflict-based model of the MFC is inappropriate for pregnancy-related ethical dilemmas. I draw on ethical case studies from my professional experiences as a doula and a midwife. Ultimately, I argue in favor of replacing the MFC paradigm with a feminist ethics of care paradigm.
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