Events

Start with a fact about the world:  both the US and, on average, around the globe as a whole, about 45%–that’s almost half—of all human pregnancy is unintended.

What would the world be like if all pregnancy were intended?  This extended “real-world thought experiment with normative force” explores five global-scale problems: abortion, adolescent pregnancy, high-risk pregnancy, pregnancy in rape, war rape, other forms of sexual violence, as well as population growth and decline. Rethinking both female and male reproductive control exposes some thirteen mistaken assumptions we routinely make about sex.  This conjecture also directly confronts issues of male contraception and the asymmetry of female and male reproductive control, thus pulling in the 50 percent of the human race—those with Y chromosomes—largely left out of discussions of reproductive health. This talk offers an optimistic picture of how, with long-acting reversible contraceptive technologies already available for women and on the drawing boards for men, we might reduce or resolve these big global reproductive problems.

How we see this picture—as recommendation, prediction, utopian fantasy, totalitarian plot, hypothetical conjecture, or realistic solution—depends to a great degree on which of thirteen problematic assumptions we maintain. Taking on sensitive topics like abortion and rape and religious issues around contraception, even about cost, this thought experiment “with normative force” shows how a fully informed, nonideological approach could defuse much of the friction such issues tend to generate. This talk,finally, takes a global view, inviting us to consider a possible—even plausible—with full personal reproductive control for all–female, male, and anyone with reproductive capability.

Margaret Pabst Battin (nicknamed Peggy) is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Internal Medicine, Center for Health Ethics, Arts and Humanities, at the University of Utah.  She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, and holds an M.F.A. in fiction-writing and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Irvine.  The author of prize-winning short stories and recipient of the University of Utah’s Distinguished Research Award, she has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited some twenty books, among them a study of philosophical issues in suicide; a scholarly edition of John Donne’s Biathanatos; a collection on age-rationing in medical care; Puzzles About Art, a volume of case-puzzles in aesthetics; a text on professional ethics; Ethics in the Sanctuary, a study of ethical issues in organized religion; and a first collection of her essays on end-of-life issues, The Least Worst Death..  She has also been engaged in research on active euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Netherlands, known as MAID, for Medical Aid in Dying, in Canada and the United States.  She has also published Ethical Issues in Suicide, trade-titled The Death Debate, as well as several co-edited or co-authored collections, including Drug Use in Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide;  Physician-Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate; Praying for a Cure, a jointly authored volume on the ethics of religious refusal of medical treatment; and Medicine and Social Justice. In 1997 she received the University of Utah’s Distinguished Research award, and in 2000, she received the Rosenblatt Prize, the University of Utah’s most prestigious award.  She was named Distinguished Honors Professor in 2002-03.   A second collection of her essays (and fiction) on end-of-life issues, entitled Ending Life, was published in spring 2005 by Oxford University Press.   She is the lead author of two multi-authored projects, Drugs and Justice: Seeking a Consistent, Coherent, Comprehensive View (Oxford, 2008) and  The Patient as Victim and Vector: Ethics and Infectious Disease (Oxford, 2009, reissued in 2021 with a new Preface on Covid-19). She is the general editor of The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources, Oxford University Press, September 2015, an extensive sourcebook coupled with a free online Digital Archive hosted by the J. Willard Marriot Library at the University of Utah <ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu>.  She is at work concerning the difference between “suicide” and “physician aid in dying”; on a “personal anthology” of papers on real-world thought experiments with “normative force”; and a set of novel considerations about urban design in the light of ecological, environmental, resource-use, and social issues, called “How to Live in an Italian Hill Town and Still Get to Walmart.”  Her most recent book, Sex and the Planet: What Opt-In Reproduction Could Do for the Globe, published May 28, 2024, by The MIT Press; addresses large-scale reproductive issues, from abortion to world population growth, and both female and male reproductive rights.   She has been named one of the “Mothers of Bioethics.”