Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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Sophie Lewis is a daring author and her range of arguments regarding gestatory labour push the conversation way past the easy ‘it takes a village’ cliché. Volunteer surrogacy may sound like a perfect way to encourage communal child-rearing, but Lewis says that, in practice, altruistic surrogacy usually has the same dynamic as commercial surrogacy, insofar as a woman still gets pregnant with a wealthier woman’s baby. Relentless in the task of seizing of the means of reproduction, Sophie Lewis is the Right's worst nightmare. The Farm” is a largely naturalistic book set in a modern-day New York, where the immigrants live in Flushing and the rich live on Park Avenue. When she describes a job at Golden Oaks as a “gateway to a better life,” she appears to mostly believe what she’s saying.

has entered the clients’ lives, their surrogates, even after earning the “big money,” are in similar circumstances to those they were in at the story’s beginning.I will reread this book for the sense it gives me that new ways of making one another and the world new might, in fact, be possible. Lewis fantasizes about replacing the modern family with a “classless commune,” where children don’t belong to anyone—a commune that would eventually render commercial surrogacy obsolete. the book is particularly strong when it is giving information on sub movements within feminism arguing on surrogacy.

She implores her reader not just to redraw the teams but to reinvent the game entirely: “We are the makers of one another. First, to what extent is the vision desirable, and what methodologies are used to decide upon that vision?For example, the peculiar sense of ownership parents often have over children: ‘Obviously, infants do belong to the people who care for them in a sense, but they aren’t property’ (19). She sees surrogacy as work, but, unlike Lewis, who believes that work is inherently oppressive, Mae thinks that work can set you free. Lewis could evade this concern by assuming that all future communes worth discussing will be places with such intimate ties simpliciter. At one point, a Catholic surrogate is forced to have an abortion after a doctor discovers that the fetus has a possible birth defect.

This book is a must-read for those interested in queer feminist engagements with family, reproductive labour and global class relations.Adopting this expanded concept of surrogacy helps us to see that it always, as the saying goes, takes a village to raise a child. Read it and let’s imagine different constellations of care, love and family beyond the conservative restraint of supposed biology. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. She is a member of the Out of the Woods collective, an editor at Blind Field: a Journal of Cultural Inquiry , and a queer feminist committed to cyborg ecology and anti-fascism.

This kind of gestation depends on realizing the implications of knowing that we all actually, materially, make one another, and that this labor continues to be exploited, extracted, and alienated-unequally-at every turn in Capitalism and Patriarchy. But—as Lewis notes—this has often been done out of necessity rather than being optimally what the people want.Footnote 1 For the reproductive commune, such intimate ties to multiple particular persons may exist, but they may not, and it is quite a jump to have faith it will simply work out for the children. And yet, notions of property are central to discussions of surrogacy under capitalism and within legal discussions.