2025 Annual Uehiro Lectures
Lecture 3: Girls’ Rights against Gestational Labour

These three lectures scrutinize different profiles of reproductive rights. The first lecture focuses on men. It examines men’s gestational inability and consequent dependency on others for reproduction and parenting opportunities. The second lecture focuses on women. It looks at the ramifications of reproductive dependency, first, for fertile women’s personal relationships with gestationally dependent partners and, second, for women’s relations to their society and to the species, which also depend on them taking on the risky labour of gestating. That lecture explains that we may acknowledge the normative significance of dependency without overstepping a key line in the sand, that women have a categorical right to control their own gestational labour. The final lecture focuses on girls. It shows that girls’ concerns are distinct in key ways from women’s concerns. It defends girls’ rights as children to be protected from gestational labour.