Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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While this focus on commercial surrogacy in India could have quickly become a ‘save the women of the global south’ saviour approach, Lewis takes seriously the agency of surrogates and their demands as workers. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. And the clients, of course, are willing to “do anything” for their unborn children—that’s why they’ve come to Golden Oaks in the first place. To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.

The influence of radical and cyborg feminists (for example, Firestone Reference Firestone1970; Haraway Reference Haraway1991) is clear here. Surrogates are already challenging how families are created and give us a glimpse at an alternative future: “a premonition of genuine mutuality” (167) if done well. But, if the vision is ultimately anticapitalist and procommunist, as Lewis argues it is, then the idea of payment, and attaching the norms surrounding the marketplace to surrogacy, seem to make for uncomfortable bedfellows. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). Examples also come from alternative kinds of kinning, such as from Black, queer, trans, and migrant communities who disrupt ways of doing families.

It reveals the sheer effort involved in any pregnancy, how that effort is naturalized, and why we should resist such naturalization since it makes the work being done invisible. It’s unclear how much money the surrogates take home afterward—especially once the scouts take their cut. Lewis could evade this concern by assuming that all future communes worth discussing will be places with such intimate ties simpliciter.

Access to abortion is especially important, if we are to take seriously the gestator's rights to strike by “killing” a fetus (140). 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.

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. 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. 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.

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.And yet, notions of property are central to discussions of surrogacy under capitalism and within legal discussions. Lewis rightly criticizes abolitionists who want to outlaw surrogacy for not asking the surrogates what they want.