Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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Only then can we begin to break down our assumptions that children “belong” to those whose genetics they share. The Farm” is an ensemble book, told from the perspective of four different characters, but its hero is Jane, a Filipina-American woman in her early twenties, who turns to Golden Oaks after she’s fired from her baby-nurse job and can find no better way to support her infant daughter. 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. For instance, the analysis is admirably about the ordinary when it deals with the “problem of pregnancy” (1).

Third, and finally, we may worry about who might end up doing the gestation part of surrogacy in a reproductive commune. However, it is not obvious that this is the approach Lewis should favor, given the emphasis on listening to surrogates in the current abolition debate. Full Surrogacy Now is more than an intervention, it is a landmark text of visionary feminist thinking. We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience.

The section reflecting on this position is excellent (25-26), showing that those who have no personal experience of a topic can, of course, still do excellent scholarship that platforms workers’ rights and activist demands alongside imagining radical utopian futures. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers.

in photography—and she’s a restless spirit, desperate for moral clarity and “the knowledge that she is doing something inarguably worthwhile. But it is not clear what this hybrid situation might look like or how it squares with the ideas from the sci-fi novels mentioned earlier.Once their demands for better conditions and collectives have been met, Lewis suggests surrogates are the ones likely to want wider reproductive justice: “Families who have helped other families might enact ongoing kinship though forms of solidarity more meaningful than payment” (147). We are the makers of one another,” Lewis argues, “and we could learn collectively to act like it” (19–20). However, surrogacy being work is a means to “maximally eradicate work” (125), not an end in itself: we need to see work where it is (not necessarily increase or enjoy it) before we can get to abolishing capital. This might sound like a radical proposal but expanding our idea of who children belong to would be a good thing.