Why pregnancy is not a disease: a critique from the perspective of biological trade-offs

This paper aims to critique the argument constructed by Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen that pregnancy is a disease. Their argument that pregnancy fits the features of disease they enumerate stems from an analysis based on an ontological framework I term the 'logic of the list'. This framework fails to grasp the essential and pervasive nature of the biological trade-offs that characterise complex phenomena like pregnancy. This paper argues that the generative logic behind many of the negative features of pregnancy differs significantly from that of true pathological processes. They are not signs of pathological dysregulation, but rather the structural costs that a complex adaptive system must pay in its process of reproduction.