Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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It draws all pregnant people, and also those who support pregnant people (that is, all of us), rather than only those engaged in the niche practice of surrogacy, into the discussion. First, to what extent is the vision desirable, and what methodologies are used to decide upon that vision? 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. In it Lewis offers an engaging reading of the realities of working within the contemporary commercial surrogacy industry as well as an analysis of the consequences of thinking about pregnancy as gestational labour. At the same time, one could opt for developing alternative, better, and more appealing work opportunities to surrogacy so as not to make existing surrogates worse-off.

Rooted in historical, site-based, narrative, and political accounts, Full Surrogacy Now is the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for. Lewis rigorously argues for the world she wants to create, but her book is too polemical to rigorously imagine it. It offers both a convincing polemic about surrogacy's past and present, and a vision of how to make it both more common and more mutually beneficial. While Lewis would like to replace this inherited love with a more logical kind of affection, one based on earned affinity or “kith and kind,” Ramos’s novel explores the warped devotion of parents. In an interview with Verso, Lewis explains that family abolition is ‘about the proliferation of relationships of care’, which she has also written about extensively in her many other articles for outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation , Jacobin , Red Pepper and others.It does not advocate for forcing people into surrogacy and to describe its vision as akin to the dystopianism of the Handmaid's Tale is deeply ironic given Lewis' biting critique of Atwood's novel. In other words, if it “takes a village” to raise a child, then why don’t we will such a village into existence? 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). Radical that she is, Sophie Lewis gets right to the root of the matter--and, radical that she is, finds its roots to be 'intersecting and entangled, lovely, replicative, baroque', as one of her own gestators, Donna Haraway, might put it.

These big questions are grounded with succinct histories of different forms of reproductive activism and gestational surrogacy practices. Full Surrogacy Now is more than an intervention, it is a landmark text of visionary feminist thinking.It’s isn’t like we force our Hosts to be Hosts,” she tells a prospective surrogate in an early scene. Lewis presents a rich analysis and tantalizing utopia, but some questions about the book linger; I pick out three such queries here. But, in a communal vision, another value we may want is equity in the kinds of people doing gestational labor.

Indeed, Lewis’s writing is incredibly reflexive; she applies her own analysis of a more collaborative and collective understanding of gestating to the book itself by acknowledging the long history and long future of co-thinkers and collaborators in this project. Her book, like Ramos’s, tries to depict a new conception of love—a love freed from structures of biology or circumstance, a love that recognizes that children belong to everyone.Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notion of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities.

Lewis offers a study in the context of the global care industry, where women in the Global South leave their families to care for families in the Global North, to justify this. Neither simply natural nor banally cultural, gestation appears as the unthought core of gender and sexual politics, and the key of a forthcoming womb revolution: trans-Marx meets mammal’s politics! These ideas of whose baby it is underpin much discussion around surrogacy and open up a theoretical and political vista of radical utopian demands. There is evidence of people of color in, for example, Cameroon, the Philippines, and Nigeria already raising children in a “polymaternal” (150) way, with multiple and informal caregiving in these communities.Lewis frequently, if reluctantly, compares surrogacy to sex work, another industry that persists despite being illegal. For instance, the notion of “mamahood,” where child-rearing is done without domination or a sense of property (152–53), and the adage that it “takes a village” to raise a child (147) are noted. This book is a must-read for those interested in queer feminist engagements with family, reproductive labour and global class relations. Gestational surrogacy makes it more difficult to name the “biological mother” with complete certainty, and this sort of murkiness strikes Lewis as the best possible world in which to raise children. Importantly, however, Lewis does not want more surrogacy of the same kind that exists in today's neoliberal global marketplaces, the exemplar of which is Dr.