Full Surrogacy Now Feminism Against Family

Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the “family”

The surrogacy industry is estimated to be worth over $1 billion a year, and many of its surrogates around the world work in terrible conditions—deception, wage-stealing and money skimming are rife; adequate medical care is horrifyingly absent; and informed consent is depressingly rare. In Full Surrogacy Now, Sophie Lewis brings a fresh and unique perspective to the topic. Often, we think of surrogacy as the problem, but, Full Surrogacy Now argues, we need more surrogacy, not less!

Rather than looking at surrogacy through a legal lens, Lewis argues that the needs and protection of surrogates should be put front and center. Their relationship to the babies they gestate must be rethought, as part of a move to recognize that reproduction is productive work. Only then can we begin to break down our assumptions that children “belong” to those whose genetics they share. Taking collective responsibility for children would radically transform our notions of kinship, helping us to see that it always takes a village to make a baby.

Sophie Lewis is a researcher, teacher, free-lance writer, translator and activist. Her ESRC-funded PhD was on the topic of surrogacy at the University of Manchester (UK). She is the author of a chapter in the Palgrave edited collection Intimate Economies (eds Hoffman and Moreno, 2017), of four forthcoming research articles (in Signs, Frontiers, Dialogues in Human Geography and Gender, Place and Culture), an intervention in Feminist Review, and four book reviews in Antipode and Feminism & Psychology. For MIT Press, she has translated Antje Schrupp's A Brief History of Feminism and Bini Adamczak's Communism for Children (with Jacob Blumenfeld). Her non-academic cultural critique appears on several platforms including: Blind Field, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, Mute, Salvage and Viewpoint.