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Pregnancy in Sport

by Simon Longstaff

In the debate about whether pregnant women should be prevented from playing sport, it is the unborn children, the pregnant athletes and the sporting organisations involved whose rights must be weighed and balanced. One way to develop a position on the ethical issues concerning pregnancy in sport is to look at the rights of each of these groups, and assess where the balance may lie.

Unborn children and pregnant athletes have the right to protection from injury and risk of injury, and this has implications for both pregnant women and their sporting organisations. Making poor decisions in the ethical arena can have significant consequences for sporting organisations, as they share some of the legal and ethical responsibility for ensuring that conditions do not arise in which preventable harm could occur to pregnant athletes or their unborn children. Organisations could suffer damage to their reputations as a result of unethical behaviour that allowed an injury to occur – even if they were not legally liable. This could also affect an organisation's economic future, and even the future success of its athletes.

Foetuses have the right to be cared for by their parents – pregnant athletes share in the responsibility for protecting their unborn children. Athletes also have a right to determine the shape of their own lives even if pregnant, and this in turn should include the right to engage in activities that might actually represent some risk to an unborn child, such as driving a car, playing sport and so on. It is impossible to remove all risk from the path of an unborn child.

Parents should be assumed to have the best interests of their children in mind and be allowed to balance the competing interests that arise from time to time, because in principle no group has a stronger interest in the welfare of children than parents. Parents should also be allowed to assert and protect their privacy, especially in relation to something as intimate as pregnancy. It should be up to parents to decide when they will tell others about a pregnancy.

The recognition of these responsibilities, and of the fact that unborn children cannot assert their own rights, does not indicate that a third party, such as a sporting organisation, may step in if it feels it's necessary. It is also in the interests of the child that parents take these responsibilities and assume these rights.

If an organisation insisted that pregnant women had to reveal their pregnancies at particular times, or banned them from sport in order to protect the unborn children, it would then be breaching the rights of those women to liberty and privacy, unless it could justify the decisions on other grounds. In order to justify such a ruling, an organisation might have to show that a serious risk to the health of the women and their unborn children existed.

However, in the absence of any clear and unambiguous evidence that exercise (and most sports) might harm pregnant women and their unborn children, it's difficult to see how any organisation could be justified in infringing women's rights in this way.

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