Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

Product Information

An instructive and moving book about the work of babymaking and the best possible future for birthing and raising children. in photography—and she’s a restless spirit, desperate for moral clarity and “the knowledge that she is doing something inarguably worthwhile. Rather than looking at surrogacy through a legal lens, Lewis argues that the needs and protection of surrogates should be put front and center.

For example, if immediately, then we continue to exploit surrogates in the terrible ways outlined; if in the end state, then we desist from all surrogacy and remove work options from surrogates until then.

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).

For one, oppressed peoples may want to hold onto “their” families as important sites of resistance, as Lewis notes in relation to Palestinians seeking genetics-preserving IVF (155). In Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family , Sophie Lewis offers a new radical engagement with surrogacy, highlighting the systematic inconsistences in prevailing understandings of the family and birthing and advocating for a communal approach to reproductive labour that enables the proliferation of relationships of care. From the opening line, ‘It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us’ (1) to the closing words, ‘the promise of the reproductive commune’ (168), Lewis provides a brave and incredibly interesting exploration of what it means to birth and care in relation to others.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 all cases, workers can make their labor visible, and they can unionize, strike, and demand better pay and working conditions from employers, and they can form collectives in alternative work arrangements (73, 75, 77, 80). It’s unclear how much money the surrogates take home afterward—especially once the scouts take their cut.

This book goes far into places where few gender abolitionists have ventured and brings us a vision of another life. 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 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. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. Children of such families in the Philippines do not seem to mind the arrangement, come out mostly fine, and have intimate relations with others, according to one study (130).