Abstract
Elselijn Kingma (2018, 2019) argues that the popular view that the foetus is merely contained by the mother is inconsistent with the biology of pregnancy. Instead, she argues that the foetus is a part of the mother based on various physiological criteria. I argue that immune tolerance, a criterion of parthood for Kingma, cannot be a criterion for spatiotemporal parthood because it is nontransitive and symmetrical while spatiotemporal parthood is transitive and antisymmetrical. However, it is clear that the relation is stronger than containment. So, I propose that the foetus and mother overlap - what Finn (2021) calls the Overlap View.
