Baby Parts

In her recent work, Elselijn Kingma applies four criteria for the individuation of an organism to determine whether the fetus is a part of or mereologically distinct from the mother. These criteria are: homeostasis, metabolic and functional integration, topological continuity, and immunological tolerance. She concludes on the basis of these four criteria that the evidence supports a thesis to the effect that the fetus is a part of the mother and that the point of topological continuity is at the placenta, a "shared organ." In this paper, I use Kingma's four criteria offered to argue that the fetus is mereologically distinct from the mother; the fetus is not a maternal part. The placenta, which I argue is a fetal part, is precisely the point at which there is topological discontinuity between mother and fetus.