What do you think?
Rate this book
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.
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.
224 pages, Paperback
First published May 7, 2019
125 people are currently reading
3072 people want to read
About the author
Sophie Lewis
6 books99 followersSophie Lewis is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia, teaching courses for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her first book was Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, Boston Review, n+1, the London Review of Books and Salvage. Sophie studied English, Politics, Environment and Geography at Oxford, the New School, and Manchester University, and is now an unpaid visiting scholar at the Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 126 reviews
January 25, 2020
This was one of the hardest books I've ever read. While the content was radical and extraordinary and thought-provoking (and has completely changed my own personal considerations regarding whether or not I would like to have my own child or not), the writing style was excessively convoluted. I believe the content of this book is important and compelling and should be widely examined and discussed, however I am sad to acknowledge that the language itself renders it completely inaccessible to most readers, thinkers, and people in general who may be interested in this topic.
May 30, 2021
Back in 2017, I read Kathryn Joyce's "The Child Catchers", which was an investigation into the adoption industry and the various harms it's done to children and parents and the various ideologies that underlay the marketing of adoption. At the time I declared that if my partner and I ever decided to have kids, I would not choose to adopt.
Since then, I have learned a lot about some of the other alternatives that queer families (or perhaps more honestly, homonormative families) have when thinking of having kids. I learned about the abuses of the foster care system and its close relationship with the criminalization and incarceration of parents, especially Black mothers. And when a YouTube video (by agender British-Indian video essayist Shonalika) cited Sophie Lewis, I discovered that she had apparently written a radical queer book that centers a discussion of the third option - that is, IVF-surrogacy.
I'll admit, it's pretty easy to get me sold on radical queer critiques of family, especially if those are spelled out in ways that not only include but center trans and queer people in the analysis. It's easy for me to cheer when a queer Marxist feminist tears down the reactionary "liberal feminist" (or "cultural feminist") mystification of the work that goes into pregnancy (or as Lewis calls it, "gestational labor"). I find it easy to agree many of the basic arguments here, that babies are already commodified and the labor of people who carry them is exploited, and the existence of paid surrogacy only draws more attention to that fact rather than creating it; that the call to control and prevent surrogacy is not championed by the people who do that labor and the organizations and advocates that come from that group; that the opposition to surrogacy is deeply intertwined with white supremacist, imperialist, and most of all capitalist ideologies.
I also find myself wanting Lewis' vision for a better society in which the work of social reproduction in all its forms could be divided equitably, in which all the parts of it are acknowledged as work and then from there communally shared, in which rather than the nuclear family structure or even an extended family structure bound together by genetic ancestry we instead imagine a queer, chosen, and non-exploitative society where family has been abolished. I want that for myself and the people I care about. I want to live on a queer poly commune where we all are collectively involved in the caretaking of both younger and older generations.
This is a vision she explicitly grounds in the histories of a number of different communities, from Black communities in the United States to working class (and lower-caste) communities in India.
Admittedly, this book did struggle with a readability problem, as a lot of theory books do. The citations are many and dense and the prose tends toward complex and frequently ambiguous sentences. I'm sure there was more here that I could learn with further study, such as her cyborg-inflected gestures toward "amniotechnics" and discussion of the biology of gestation. I found her much more clear when she did rhetorical and ethnographic analysis, both of anti-surrogacy liberal (and radical) feminists and of the advocates for the capitalist surrogacy industry, specifically focusing on the company founded by Dr. Nayna Patel, which I found fascinating and in-depth, and surprisingly nuanced coming from a non-South Asian feminist source. Rooting the struggle as a labor struggle, where the goal is for gestational laborers to have the power to advocate for themselves, is a clarifying intervention that helps hold together what often seemed rather abstract to me.
At the same time, I personally found this book made visible and uncomfortable both my oppression and my personal privilege. The demand for "full surrogacy", for reproductive and gestational labor, is a utopian vision, one that I both want desperately and that feels unattainable. I came into this asking "how can I ethically be a queer parent?", and I didn't really get an answer, just a blueprint for a better future that's only starting to become visible. In the end, I think that might be more valuable.
Since then, I have learned a lot about some of the other alternatives that queer families (or perhaps more honestly, homonormative families) have when thinking of having kids. I learned about the abuses of the foster care system and its close relationship with the criminalization and incarceration of parents, especially Black mothers. And when a YouTube video (by agender British-Indian video essayist Shonalika) cited Sophie Lewis, I discovered that she had apparently written a radical queer book that centers a discussion of the third option - that is, IVF-surrogacy.
I'll admit, it's pretty easy to get me sold on radical queer critiques of family, especially if those are spelled out in ways that not only include but center trans and queer people in the analysis. It's easy for me to cheer when a queer Marxist feminist tears down the reactionary "liberal feminist" (or "cultural feminist") mystification of the work that goes into pregnancy (or as Lewis calls it, "gestational labor"). I find it easy to agree many of the basic arguments here, that babies are already commodified and the labor of people who carry them is exploited, and the existence of paid surrogacy only draws more attention to that fact rather than creating it; that the call to control and prevent surrogacy is not championed by the people who do that labor and the organizations and advocates that come from that group; that the opposition to surrogacy is deeply intertwined with white supremacist, imperialist, and most of all capitalist ideologies.
I also find myself wanting Lewis' vision for a better society in which the work of social reproduction in all its forms could be divided equitably, in which all the parts of it are acknowledged as work and then from there communally shared, in which rather than the nuclear family structure or even an extended family structure bound together by genetic ancestry we instead imagine a queer, chosen, and non-exploitative society where family has been abolished. I want that for myself and the people I care about. I want to live on a queer poly commune where we all are collectively involved in the caretaking of both younger and older generations.
This is a vision she explicitly grounds in the histories of a number of different communities, from Black communities in the United States to working class (and lower-caste) communities in India.
Admittedly, this book did struggle with a readability problem, as a lot of theory books do. The citations are many and dense and the prose tends toward complex and frequently ambiguous sentences. I'm sure there was more here that I could learn with further study, such as her cyborg-inflected gestures toward "amniotechnics" and discussion of the biology of gestation. I found her much more clear when she did rhetorical and ethnographic analysis, both of anti-surrogacy liberal (and radical) feminists and of the advocates for the capitalist surrogacy industry, specifically focusing on the company founded by Dr. Nayna Patel, which I found fascinating and in-depth, and surprisingly nuanced coming from a non-South Asian feminist source. Rooting the struggle as a labor struggle, where the goal is for gestational laborers to have the power to advocate for themselves, is a clarifying intervention that helps hold together what often seemed rather abstract to me.
At the same time, I personally found this book made visible and uncomfortable both my oppression and my personal privilege. The demand for "full surrogacy", for reproductive and gestational labor, is a utopian vision, one that I both want desperately and that feels unattainable. I came into this asking "how can I ethically be a queer parent?", and I didn't really get an answer, just a blueprint for a better future that's only starting to become visible. In the end, I think that might be more valuable.
April 12, 2020
Aldous Huxley suggested precisely what the author does in his book, "Brave New World", where families are abolished and "mother" and "father" are shockingly rude words. Only he knew this would be a horrific dystopia.
October 1, 2020
DNF I often do enjoy Donna Haraway and can get around some of the clunky academic language because she still manages to define her theoretical terms. She gave her endorsement to this book but even as a theoretical academic work, I cannot get into it. The writing is needlessly convoluted by the language used with lots of signaling toward the "bad" feminism and I frankly disagree with the trajectory of this discourse. I don't think it's helpful to define living things and reproductive labor in economic values. If we could simply rid ourselves of capitalism (if theoretically that could be achieved) new means of value would emerge. Women's liberation and autonomy over our own bodies, not something to wield or wielded over, and apart from any assigned value must be the basis. I see the trajectory of this resulting in further alienation and a different kind of commodification that will inevitably come to harm women. We should be able to interrogate the family and patriarchy without resorting to this form of alienation. I think we should question formations and bonds, especially the way that hierarchical structures harbor abuse, but to what end?
December 7, 2023
Very interesting
Read
January 5, 2022this book wasn’t for me and that is ok! i like Sophie Lewis, I think she is a really engaging speaker and I appreciate her commitment to bringing back round discussion about The Family. I was looking for a nonfiction book about surrogacy that introduced the topic and laid out the critical arguments against and ‘in defence’ of the industry, something like Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac. I realised early on this is definitely not that book!
the book is made up of loosely tied together chapters— it kicks off looking at pregnancy and numerous risks to ‘birth givers’ due to gestating, giving birth and raising children eg risk of death, post partum depression and raising children with no support from the state. there’s a potted history of white feminists interactions with women in the global south. there’s a long analysis of the handmaids tale, both the book and HBO series. linked to this is criticism of liberal feminists utilisation of the handmaids tale in protesting against antiabortion legislation. it seems to take a while to get into the meat of the book — surrogacy — in terms of her position I think it’s summarised here:
“Unlike most legal scholars and activists in the Stop Surrogacy Now campaign, I am interested neither in defending against disruptions to the prevailing mode of reproduction per se, nor in applauding Surrogacy™ simply on the grounds that it is a disruption.”
“Full surrogacy now,” “another surrogacy is possible”: to the extent that these interchangeable sentiments imply a revolutionary program (as I’d like them to) I’d propose it be animated by the following invitations. Let’s bring about the conditions of possibility for open-source, fully collaborative gestation. Let’s prefigure a way of manufacturing one another noncompetitively. Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notions of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities. Let us build a care commune based on comradeship, a world sustained by kith and kind more than by kin. Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the “family.”
I think it’s clear that Lewis envisions a future of surrogacy workers being considered workers in the same way those who sell sex are now understood as sex workers — (“Surrogacy bans uproot, isolate, and criminalize gestational workers, driving them underground and often into foreign lands, where they risk prosecution alongside their bosses and brokers, far away from their support networks”). Despite asserting at a couple of points that surrogacy workers want themselves to be considered as workers (and understandably want all the rights that come along with that) there is very little interaction with people doing surrogacy in this book or a proper exploration of their opinions which I found disappointing.
in terms of where I stood on this book and Lewis argument I still have a lot of questions and comments that i won’t really go into because 1. I cba typing it all out and 2. I struggled with this one a lot and there’s probably a high chance I’ve misinterpreted what Lewis has said.
in terms of prose this is an very dense text that only gets more dense and complex as you go on. my perception of Lewis is of a hyper-academic, very-divorced-from-reality (sorry!!) sort of utopian commentator and that makes me a little bit weary of the stuff she says. even if it’s reasonable and good, when you don’t communicate stuff in a normal, penetrable way then its easy to feel like this sort of ideas and arguments only belong to and can be discussed by certain types of people.
it’s a shame because I think this is an important topic. nonetheless I will have a go at the next book she is writing!
the book is made up of loosely tied together chapters— it kicks off looking at pregnancy and numerous risks to ‘birth givers’ due to gestating, giving birth and raising children eg risk of death, post partum depression and raising children with no support from the state. there’s a potted history of white feminists interactions with women in the global south. there’s a long analysis of the handmaids tale, both the book and HBO series. linked to this is criticism of liberal feminists utilisation of the handmaids tale in protesting against antiabortion legislation. it seems to take a while to get into the meat of the book — surrogacy — in terms of her position I think it’s summarised here:
“Unlike most legal scholars and activists in the Stop Surrogacy Now campaign, I am interested neither in defending against disruptions to the prevailing mode of reproduction per se, nor in applauding Surrogacy™ simply on the grounds that it is a disruption.”
“Full surrogacy now,” “another surrogacy is possible”: to the extent that these interchangeable sentiments imply a revolutionary program (as I’d like them to) I’d propose it be animated by the following invitations. Let’s bring about the conditions of possibility for open-source, fully collaborative gestation. Let’s prefigure a way of manufacturing one another noncompetitively. Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notions of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities. Let us build a care commune based on comradeship, a world sustained by kith and kind more than by kin. Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the “family.”
I think it’s clear that Lewis envisions a future of surrogacy workers being considered workers in the same way those who sell sex are now understood as sex workers — (“Surrogacy bans uproot, isolate, and criminalize gestational workers, driving them underground and often into foreign lands, where they risk prosecution alongside their bosses and brokers, far away from their support networks”). Despite asserting at a couple of points that surrogacy workers want themselves to be considered as workers (and understandably want all the rights that come along with that) there is very little interaction with people doing surrogacy in this book or a proper exploration of their opinions which I found disappointing.
in terms of where I stood on this book and Lewis argument I still have a lot of questions and comments that i won’t really go into because 1. I cba typing it all out and 2. I struggled with this one a lot and there’s probably a high chance I’ve misinterpreted what Lewis has said.
in terms of prose this is an very dense text that only gets more dense and complex as you go on. my perception of Lewis is of a hyper-academic, very-divorced-from-reality (sorry!!) sort of utopian commentator and that makes me a little bit weary of the stuff she says. even if it’s reasonable and good, when you don’t communicate stuff in a normal, penetrable way then its easy to feel like this sort of ideas and arguments only belong to and can be discussed by certain types of people.
it’s a shame because I think this is an important topic. nonetheless I will have a go at the next book she is writing!
December 3, 2019
*Full Surrogacy Now* is a beautiful book. Lewis' argument is full of compelling and nuanced analysis of surrogacy's entrapment within global capitalism - and the possibility that it could be abolished as a form of property and work. Such an argument requires nothing short of thinking beyond the nuclear family form, of the possessive individualism that seeps into the commonsense notion that one's children are "one's own." The possibility that even an embattled surrogacy reveals for Lewis is instead an excessive, generous, and painful layering of relations of care, cohabitation, and kinship that go well beyond the confines of parent-child relations, but must be liberated so that *we all* - especially proletarians, workers, the postcolonial, the still colonized, the enslaved, queers and nonbinary people - can experience a kind of collective coinhabitation of a planet we are currently killing. I will not give away the astonishing prose, but the final short chapter on "a communist amniotechnics" made me cry.
What *Full Surrogacy Now* does that is so rare and rewarding is open a space to see your struggle as this struggle, it expands the problematic of surrogacy away from any privative cordoned-off or self-interested interest-group politics, and instead asks of us - what if we all lived as if surrogates of each other? This project, Lewis writes,
"stands for the levelling up and interpenetration of all of what are currently called 'families' until they dissolve into a classless commune on the basis of the best available care for all. To move in that direction, we have to read the oldness, the notnewness, of surrogacy against the grain, retheorizing gestation from the standpoint of a plural womb and a world beyond prpertarian kinship and work alienation. this implies a multigender feminism in which the labor of gestation is not policed by well meaning ethicists, but rather ongoingly revolutionized by struggles seeking to ease, aid, and redistribute it."
What *Full Surrogacy Now* does that is so rare and rewarding is open a space to see your struggle as this struggle, it expands the problematic of surrogacy away from any privative cordoned-off or self-interested interest-group politics, and instead asks of us - what if we all lived as if surrogates of each other? This project, Lewis writes,
"stands for the levelling up and interpenetration of all of what are currently called 'families' until they dissolve into a classless commune on the basis of the best available care for all. To move in that direction, we have to read the oldness, the notnewness, of surrogacy against the grain, retheorizing gestation from the standpoint of a plural womb and a world beyond prpertarian kinship and work alienation. this implies a multigender feminism in which the labor of gestation is not policed by well meaning ethicists, but rather ongoingly revolutionized by struggles seeking to ease, aid, and redistribute it."
July 17, 2020
I have such mixed feelings about this book. I think it could have been a fantastic read but its use of language makes it so inaccessible to almost anyone other than Lewis and her direct peers that it is genuinely difficult to read.
Lewis is a theoretician and this is certainly a theory text rather than general non-fiction book about surrogacy. I get the impression that Lewis is aiming this book at scholars (particularly Marxist family abolitionist feminists) rather than the general public.
I found myself reading and re-reading paragraphs two or three times to (a) understand the words being used and (b) determine the argument Lewis is making, and whether it is credible. It was frustrating that Lewis would frequently use niche terms and barely, if at all, define them (even to define the terms of the argument she makes) e.g. cyborg feminism.
A few times in the book, Lewis seemed to indulge in literal wordplay for a few paragraphs, tie it in to a single point of substance and then suggest that this example is what is meant by "full surrogacy now". This was most obvious and frustrating in the conclusion. At the end of the book I felt I was left with a very vague sense of Lewis's actual position on how full surrogacy would work and the conditions necessary to protect surrogates as workers. Lewis was much clearer in critiquing other scholars', clinicians' and writers' arguments than in articulating the parameters of her own.
Perhaps my expectations of this book were unrealistic - I was hoping for something that would be more accessible but still challenging. It felt as though the book was barely edited, or that the editor didn’t recognise that long, dense sentences with neologisms and unfamiliar theory terms would be offputting to non-scholars.
The book does have some excellent and compelling analysis so I am certain I will read and refer to it again (and hopefully find it easier to read a second time). However I will have to recommend it to others with the caveat that it is a book that will be laborious to read.
Lewis is a theoretician and this is certainly a theory text rather than general non-fiction book about surrogacy. I get the impression that Lewis is aiming this book at scholars (particularly Marxist family abolitionist feminists) rather than the general public.
I found myself reading and re-reading paragraphs two or three times to (a) understand the words being used and (b) determine the argument Lewis is making, and whether it is credible. It was frustrating that Lewis would frequently use niche terms and barely, if at all, define them (even to define the terms of the argument she makes) e.g. cyborg feminism.
A few times in the book, Lewis seemed to indulge in literal wordplay for a few paragraphs, tie it in to a single point of substance and then suggest that this example is what is meant by "full surrogacy now". This was most obvious and frustrating in the conclusion. At the end of the book I felt I was left with a very vague sense of Lewis's actual position on how full surrogacy would work and the conditions necessary to protect surrogates as workers. Lewis was much clearer in critiquing other scholars', clinicians' and writers' arguments than in articulating the parameters of her own.
Perhaps my expectations of this book were unrealistic - I was hoping for something that would be more accessible but still challenging. It felt as though the book was barely edited, or that the editor didn’t recognise that long, dense sentences with neologisms and unfamiliar theory terms would be offputting to non-scholars.
The book does have some excellent and compelling analysis so I am certain I will read and refer to it again (and hopefully find it easier to read a second time). However I will have to recommend it to others with the caveat that it is a book that will be laborious to read.
June 20, 2022
Beneficial insofar as its radical and wild assertion ("I argue in this book that we must [...] unlearn gestation-exceptionalism in our thinking about labor militancy.") is something new to consider, aka as an exercise in considering, debate, and thinking about. I didn't find the arguments convincing nor based in material reality, and the author herself reiterates her ideas as idealism and admits that "I have never gestated nor worked as a surrogate." Just... Anyway. Really not that well-written despite its use of academic jargon—the opposite of succinct and/or compelling.
September 16, 2019
This is an interesting book. I'm happy that I read, it gave me a bibliography that I won't be able to exhaust for a while. But I'm disappointed, I guess because I was looking for a marxist-feminist theory of gestational work or some inspiration for imagining better social organization of such labor. There are various different arguments in the book but the biggest message is not clear in my opinion. "Full Surrogacy Now" is an empty slogan as it is. Is giving a new meaning to the word "surrogacy" really necessary if our imagination will go beyond the capitalism? why surrogacy anyway? We have the old communist utopia of full socialization of care. Why would anything beyond that would be necessary because all children are our children in such society anyway, infertility doesn't even matter. Gestational commune is just a fancy new word that doesn't add anything to the old utopia. If the book was primarily about commercial surrogacy industry and improving gestational workers' conditions, that wouldn't have bothered me. But it has a claim to politically transform surrogacy for a broader social cause so you expect some better understanding of such social order imaginary.
I really don't understand what is to point of insisting on using "pregnant people" instead of women or mothers for gestational workers, apparently it is for the sake of inclusivity. Ok, don't call it women, call it "human species with uterus", it takes a uterus to do the work, material fact! And it is clear having a uterus is not privilege, on the contrary it is a curse in current patriarchal capitalist societies (measured/unmeasured motherhood penalty is in every sphere of life) .
It is worth to read but I think it fails to hold its promise.
I really don't understand what is to point of insisting on using "pregnant people" instead of women or mothers for gestational workers, apparently it is for the sake of inclusivity. Ok, don't call it women, call it "human species with uterus", it takes a uterus to do the work, material fact! And it is clear having a uterus is not privilege, on the contrary it is a curse in current patriarchal capitalist societies (measured/unmeasured motherhood penalty is in every sphere of life) .
It is worth to read but I think it fails to hold its promise.
January 10, 2023
I had really high expectations of this book, because recently I've really gotten into literature on motherhood, communism, feminism and family abolishment. While it brings up some really interesting ideas that I wholeheartedly agree with, some things still didn't sit right with me:
1. The language: I'm a literature and philosophy student so most of the time I read academic literature. I know that academic language is sometime harder to read, but I don't think it should be! I think that if a text is hard to understands, it's probably badly written. I would love for literature like that to me more accessible to everyone - but with complex language like that it sadly only caters to a small group of people.
2. The structure: I would have loved for this book to have a clearer structure. It felt like the authors was sometimes jumping back and forth between topics and repeating points over and over again with no clear outline.
3. Conclusion: I know that "abolish capitalism, abolish the family and turn to communism" would be a great conclusion to draw here but sadly it's a very vague and at this time unrealistic one. I would have liked some more concrete ideas about what the future could look like.
1. The language: I'm a literature and philosophy student so most of the time I read academic literature. I know that academic language is sometime harder to read, but I don't think it should be! I think that if a text is hard to understands, it's probably badly written. I would love for literature like that to me more accessible to everyone - but with complex language like that it sadly only caters to a small group of people.
2. The structure: I would have loved for this book to have a clearer structure. It felt like the authors was sometimes jumping back and forth between topics and repeating points over and over again with no clear outline.
3. Conclusion: I know that "abolish capitalism, abolish the family and turn to communism" would be a great conclusion to draw here but sadly it's a very vague and at this time unrealistic one. I would have liked some more concrete ideas about what the future could look like.
May 13, 2025
Really interesting discussion of the ethics of surrogacy, the nuclear family as we know it, cultural feminism, cyborg feminism, amniotechnics, and xenofamilies. If communal care takes place over the nuclear familial structure, does this eliminate the need for surrogacy? How does this reshape the exploitative elements of surrogacy?
March 9, 2023
This was RAD and a breath of fresh air after several disappointing milquetoast feminist texts I’ve read recently. I went down the rabbit hole on surrogacy after listening to Radiolab’s “Birthstory” episode, and Lewis offered the feminist, materialist analysis I wanted to grapple with the subject. Lewis incorporates cyborg feminism, Marxism, science fiction, climate justice, and more into this manifesto — as when I read Whipping Girl, I longed to parse through the chapters in the setting of an undergrad GSFS seminar.
One star deducted because of how unnecessarily dense and academic the language was. Judith Butler is quaking in their boots!!! This book seems to be written for other academics and feminist scholars, and I wish it were more accessible and straightforward to better speak to audiences beyond Lewis’s peers.
All said, this was one of the most intellectually challenging and thought-provoking texts I’ve read in a long time and I look forward to seeing what scholarship Lewis creates in the future!
One star deducted because of how unnecessarily dense and academic the language was. Judith Butler is quaking in their boots!!! This book seems to be written for other academics and feminist scholars, and I wish it were more accessible and straightforward to better speak to audiences beyond Lewis’s peers.
All said, this was one of the most intellectually challenging and thought-provoking texts I’ve read in a long time and I look forward to seeing what scholarship Lewis creates in the future!
January 8, 2025
interesting and thought provoking and eye opening and much to chew on
October 25, 2020
The re-entry of the fundamental communist principle of family abolition into marxist discussion is deeply important, and Lewis brings it back into discussion on the right terrain: the life conditions and struggles of surrogate-pregnancy workers, black feminists’ articulation of non-normative caring structures among proletarian black women, and implied in the background, trans people’s struggles against sexuation. This is taken on through marxism primarily informed by Donna Haraway, and shows the substantial limits and substantial strengths of Harawayism quite strongly while remaining anchored enough in marxism to avoid Haraway’s more extreme strengths. As the majority of professed - especially academic - marxists are extremely distant from the fundamental principles that Haraway has done academic theoretical gymnastics to rediscover, this book coming from a Harawavian modification of marxist thinking is unsurprising.
Full Surrogacy is quite sharp on the immediate politics of surrogacy and on the empirical factors of class division and class composition within the surrogacy industry: the section contrasting an involuntarily-famous Thai surrogate’s actions in the face of her clients’ disowning of a baby with genetic indications of Down Syndrome on the one hand with the reactionary ideology fiercely spouted by the labor aristocracy of American freelance surrogates on the other is a bracing and useful example of this. Lewis is quite clear, too, on the part played by parenting in the production of the social abstraction of gender/sex in individuals, the central economic and social function of the family unit and the brutality of the family towards both non-cis-male parents and children. She rarely asserts any explicit model of the family, gender, race, or class relations in general, however; she leaves her models implied except to bring them somewhat to the surface in specific areas she’s focusing on, which weakens her otherwise excellent asserted moves: understanding surrogates as gestation workers (rather than primarily or necessarily as “females”) and seeking to abolish work rather than send middle-class professional abusers to “rescue” surrogacy workers, etc centers. She doesn’t explicitly address disability at all, although she brings up an empirical instance of a surrogacy worker’s resistance against clients’ eugenic impulses; this is one of the book’s biggest drawbacks. Another drawback is the complete lack of any critique of activism and the nonprofit industry, obscuring the way to a practical class-independent activity against gender/sex and enchainment to the miseries of reproductive work. The possibility of surrogate’s unions is pointed to, but never drawn out. The most “high-theory” section, although it theorizes in a romantic and mystifying register, offers an in to a communist ecology of pregnancy, which is vitally important.
TERF-watchers will be fascinated by Lewis’s mapping of the “surrogacy abolition” movement, and its exact parallel of TERFism and SWERFism: an alliance between Christian reactionaries and SERFs, surrogate-exclusionary radical feminists, including familiar enemies: Janice Raymond, Julie Bindel.
In short, this book is a seed for the politics of reproductive and bodily class struggle we need. Let’s transform it and grow it into a deeper and deeper class-independent basis. Please, please read this book.
Full Surrogacy is quite sharp on the immediate politics of surrogacy and on the empirical factors of class division and class composition within the surrogacy industry: the section contrasting an involuntarily-famous Thai surrogate’s actions in the face of her clients’ disowning of a baby with genetic indications of Down Syndrome on the one hand with the reactionary ideology fiercely spouted by the labor aristocracy of American freelance surrogates on the other is a bracing and useful example of this. Lewis is quite clear, too, on the part played by parenting in the production of the social abstraction of gender/sex in individuals, the central economic and social function of the family unit and the brutality of the family towards both non-cis-male parents and children. She rarely asserts any explicit model of the family, gender, race, or class relations in general, however; she leaves her models implied except to bring them somewhat to the surface in specific areas she’s focusing on, which weakens her otherwise excellent asserted moves: understanding surrogates as gestation workers (rather than primarily or necessarily as “females”) and seeking to abolish work rather than send middle-class professional abusers to “rescue” surrogacy workers, etc centers. She doesn’t explicitly address disability at all, although she brings up an empirical instance of a surrogacy worker’s resistance against clients’ eugenic impulses; this is one of the book’s biggest drawbacks. Another drawback is the complete lack of any critique of activism and the nonprofit industry, obscuring the way to a practical class-independent activity against gender/sex and enchainment to the miseries of reproductive work. The possibility of surrogate’s unions is pointed to, but never drawn out. The most “high-theory” section, although it theorizes in a romantic and mystifying register, offers an in to a communist ecology of pregnancy, which is vitally important.
TERF-watchers will be fascinated by Lewis’s mapping of the “surrogacy abolition” movement, and its exact parallel of TERFism and SWERFism: an alliance between Christian reactionaries and SERFs, surrogate-exclusionary radical feminists, including familiar enemies: Janice Raymond, Julie Bindel.
In short, this book is a seed for the politics of reproductive and bodily class struggle we need. Let’s transform it and grow it into a deeper and deeper class-independent basis. Please, please read this book.
August 21, 2024
c’est très difficile de donner une note à ce livre car sur de nombreux points je le trouve excellent, mais il faudrait retirer une grosse partie qui en a rendu la lecture pénible (en plus de l’écriture.) déjà je suis évidemment très intéressée par tout ce qui relève d’une vision radicale de la famille, convoquant cyborg, marxisme, sf. il y a beaucoup de "évidemment" qui résultent de cette lecture : évidemment qu’il faut aller vers une full surrogacy, dans le sens de repenser entièrement ce qu’est une gestation - qui porte, qui désire, qui élève ? et non pas qui possède. évidemment qu’il faut questionner et éclairer le gestational labor, et sur ce point ce livre m’a permis de plus approfondir ce sujet.
le gros point négatif à mes yeux reste toute la partie sur la clinique du dr nayna patel que j’ai trouvé épuisante, à traîner en longueur et en répétitions dans le seul but de prouver des evidences. j’admets que je suis usée par ces reportages sensationnalistes en général, mais je pense sincèrement que ça aurait pu être raccourci pour arriver au point le plus important : l’organisation des gestratices en tant que workers, avec leurs revendications et leurs droits. sur ce coup c’est ultra important puisque ça déplace le débat d’une zone abstraite (wether surrogacy is right or wrong) à une réalité centrée autour des droits de ces femmes (et, j’aimerais rajouter, ceux des enfants à naître ;) )
(…) wip j’ai sûrement d’autres idées à articuler
le gros point négatif à mes yeux reste toute la partie sur la clinique du dr nayna patel que j’ai trouvé épuisante, à traîner en longueur et en répétitions dans le seul but de prouver des evidences. j’admets que je suis usée par ces reportages sensationnalistes en général, mais je pense sincèrement que ça aurait pu être raccourci pour arriver au point le plus important : l’organisation des gestratices en tant que workers, avec leurs revendications et leurs droits. sur ce coup c’est ultra important puisque ça déplace le débat d’une zone abstraite (wether surrogacy is right or wrong) à une réalité centrée autour des droits de ces femmes (et, j’aimerais rajouter, ceux des enfants à naître ;) )
(…) wip j’ai sûrement d’autres idées à articuler
Read
October 9, 2022Full Surrogacy Now is a really hard book to review, because it seemed full of really interesting arguments about gestational work as labour, what it could mean to withhold that labour, the moral frameworks around surrogacy that uphold capitalism, and moving from family units to communal structures of gestation and child-rearing. However, the structure and the dense academic writing made this radical book seem quite inaccessible, and I often struggled to understand what was being said.
August 19, 2019
Igual algún día, después de muchas horas de cavilación, estaré preparada para escribirle una reseña a este pepino.
June 20, 2021
A friend of mine has been highly recommending this book for some time; he also convinced me to take an online class with Sophie Lewis this past spring (on The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone). Lewis in person (well, in Zoom person) is engaging, friendly, thoughtful, and extremely knowledgeable, but she didn't come across as the radical powerhouse you find in this book.
I think my biggest complaint about the book is how long it took me to wrap my brain around her concept of "full surrogacy," which I don't think she explains clearly up front. What she's driving at here is the idea that almost all pregnancies are surrogacies, because pregnancy is labor (and she is very aware of the pun) whether or not performed directly for money, and that thinking about pregnancy and gestation in the context of labor (physical/emothonal, life-threatening, highly consequential labor) makes it possible to think clearly about what we call surrogacy, i.e., a person being paid, or sometimes emotionally compensated, to gestate a fetus for someone else.
Lewis is supremely careful about language: "gestation" far more often than "pregnancy," "fetus" far more often than "baby," using "people" or "person" to escape assuming the gender of the gestator, and much more. This language, which we perceive as distanced because of what we're accustomed to, helps her frame her openly Marxist conception of labor and value.
These ideas are genuinely radical and often hard to take in. I tended to focus more on the details than the big picture, which led me to pick up two biological facts I wasn't aware of. First, human pregnancies are unique in the animal kingdom not just because of how long our infants take to become able to live on their own, but also because the placenta is a uniquely human organ, and makes gestation harder to end, more dangerous to the gestator, and more relational than gestation in other mammals, meaning that there is more transfer of matter and information between parent and fetus in humans. Second, she talks about "microchimerical cell transfer," which leaves fragments of a fetus's DNA in the gestator for years and decades after the birth.
Much of the book is dedicated to an examination of how (paid) surrogacy actually works globally: what are the laws, what is the language, who benefits, what are the critiques. These are things I knew vaguely, but in no detail, and had never been pushed to think intensely about, so I found the book demanding--and very satisfying.
Do I agree with her? I am not sure. Is she convincing? Yes, very.
If you can cope with both academic and somewhat Marxist writing, and if the topic interests you, check this out. You will never think casually about pregnancy, birth, and babies again -- and that's probably a good thing.
I think my biggest complaint about the book is how long it took me to wrap my brain around her concept of "full surrogacy," which I don't think she explains clearly up front. What she's driving at here is the idea that almost all pregnancies are surrogacies, because pregnancy is labor (and she is very aware of the pun) whether or not performed directly for money, and that thinking about pregnancy and gestation in the context of labor (physical/emothonal, life-threatening, highly consequential labor) makes it possible to think clearly about what we call surrogacy, i.e., a person being paid, or sometimes emotionally compensated, to gestate a fetus for someone else.
Lewis is supremely careful about language: "gestation" far more often than "pregnancy," "fetus" far more often than "baby," using "people" or "person" to escape assuming the gender of the gestator, and much more. This language, which we perceive as distanced because of what we're accustomed to, helps her frame her openly Marxist conception of labor and value.
These ideas are genuinely radical and often hard to take in. I tended to focus more on the details than the big picture, which led me to pick up two biological facts I wasn't aware of. First, human pregnancies are unique in the animal kingdom not just because of how long our infants take to become able to live on their own, but also because the placenta is a uniquely human organ, and makes gestation harder to end, more dangerous to the gestator, and more relational than gestation in other mammals, meaning that there is more transfer of matter and information between parent and fetus in humans. Second, she talks about "microchimerical cell transfer," which leaves fragments of a fetus's DNA in the gestator for years and decades after the birth.
Much of the book is dedicated to an examination of how (paid) surrogacy actually works globally: what are the laws, what is the language, who benefits, what are the critiques. These are things I knew vaguely, but in no detail, and had never been pushed to think intensely about, so I found the book demanding--and very satisfying.
Do I agree with her? I am not sure. Is she convincing? Yes, very.
If you can cope with both academic and somewhat Marxist writing, and if the topic interests you, check this out. You will never think casually about pregnancy, birth, and babies again -- and that's probably a good thing.
July 8, 2020
I wish I could give three and a half stars, so I had to settle for three. Sophie Lewis is a brilliant theorist and exceptional mind who poses fascinating questions in this unique text. I appreciated her inclusive and precise language around gestation and birthing, as many feminists irredeemably fail in that aspect, but I agree with the plethora of other reviewers critiquing her inaccessible academic jargon. It helped me to understand that this book has been adapted from her doctoral thesis, but even as someone who is decently versed in both classic and contemporary leftist theory, I found her style extremely dense and difficult to get through. A full understanding of this book would either require an encyclopedic knowledge of both communist and gestational vocabulary, or a Google search every five minutes. Through my looking-up of words, I learned some interesting new terms and occasionally stumbled upon cool, obscure feminist media, but she definitely could've found a way to make this dialectically more accessible. I think that was an oversight on the editor's part as well. With all that being said, I really enjoyed pondering her theories on full gestational communism and her nuanced commentary on surrogacy as it exists today. Lastly, I don't think she gets nearly enough credit for the humor in her writing.... "seize the means of reproduction" ??? fucking gold. I look forward to where she goes next as a theorist and will definitely continue to read her works as they arise.
December 18, 2022
3.5 stars or possibly more, honestly hard to rate this one. Sophie Lewis's writing has this peculiar quality of being both very readable yet still, to me, circling back in on itself and its own contentions in this way that leaves me intellectually kind of dizzy and bamboozled. the ideas strung together here are all indeed relevant and in conversation with each other, though Lewis seems to trip over herself in the process of trying to connect them.
there's so much good research and interesting ideas in this book, particularly in the way she uses language and conceptual framing to destabilise the normative assumptions around the family/motherhood/birth and the (as the book does make very apparent) insidiously conservative ideologies that constitute them. more than anything it is a very thorough study of the issues of the surrogacy industry mostly through the prism of its most highly publicized clinic.
despite (like my experience with "abolish the family") falling somewhat short of it's own radical aspirations -- particularly the final chapter that uses a strained "amniotic" metaphor to attempt to collect the radical possibilities presented in the rest of the book into a cogent theory of alternative sociality -- i got heaps out of this book and did really enjoy it
there's so much good research and interesting ideas in this book, particularly in the way she uses language and conceptual framing to destabilise the normative assumptions around the family/motherhood/birth and the (as the book does make very apparent) insidiously conservative ideologies that constitute them. more than anything it is a very thorough study of the issues of the surrogacy industry mostly through the prism of its most highly publicized clinic.
despite (like my experience with "abolish the family") falling somewhat short of it's own radical aspirations -- particularly the final chapter that uses a strained "amniotic" metaphor to attempt to collect the radical possibilities presented in the rest of the book into a cogent theory of alternative sociality -- i got heaps out of this book and did really enjoy it
July 24, 2023
Această carte ne arată cum putem începe să gândim în direcția unei înțelegeri și recunoașteri a exploatării muncii gestaționale care permite și chiar creează mai mult spațiu pentru solidarizare cu muncitoarele care își cer drepturile.
Inspiratoare, de asemenea, pentru felul cum putem privi în urmă, spre trecutul socialist şi spre multitudinea de înrudiri alternative cultivate atunci şi continuate în perioada aşa-zisei tranziții spre capitalism, mai ales în contextul migrației masive a muncii (deşi Lewis nu abordează tema acestei continuități, noi, cex din spatiul EE, o putem face).
Chiar dacă îşi organizează discursul conform unor tipare recognoscibile ale educației înalte, occidentale -- un discurs bine ancorat în terminologie și cercetări academice specializate la care au acces cu adevărat doar specialiștx care s-au format în spațiile de educație ale centrului, un discurs care pe alocuri poate fi intimidant, -- încurajez trecerea dincolo de acest prag şi explorarea ideilor pe care cartea lui Lewis le propune.
Traducere excelentă de Oana Uiorean.
Inspiratoare, de asemenea, pentru felul cum putem privi în urmă, spre trecutul socialist şi spre multitudinea de înrudiri alternative cultivate atunci şi continuate în perioada aşa-zisei tranziții spre capitalism, mai ales în contextul migrației masive a muncii (deşi Lewis nu abordează tema acestei continuități, noi, cex din spatiul EE, o putem face).
Chiar dacă îşi organizează discursul conform unor tipare recognoscibile ale educației înalte, occidentale -- un discurs bine ancorat în terminologie și cercetări academice specializate la care au acces cu adevărat doar specialiștx care s-au format în spațiile de educație ale centrului, un discurs care pe alocuri poate fi intimidant, -- încurajez trecerea dincolo de acest prag şi explorarea ideilor pe care cartea lui Lewis le propune.
Traducere excelentă de Oana Uiorean.
July 3, 2019
I rarely rate books before reading them, but here's the proposal:
"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"
(and yes, I'm reading it later)
"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"
(and yes, I'm reading it later)
August 27, 2022
I had to read a couple chapters from this for a class and decided to go back to it and try to read the whole thing (since I hadnt gotten much from it the first time).
Couldn’t get myself to go finish it. Book is indeed insufferably content-less among the big fancy words and nonsense phrases that want to sound deep. What’s Lewis’ point? She’s back in the 70s and can’t see it. The severing of means and ends that defines most of academia is felt deeply in this book. Full surrogacy now!
Couldn’t get myself to go finish it. Book is indeed insufferably content-less among the big fancy words and nonsense phrases that want to sound deep. What’s Lewis’ point? She’s back in the 70s and can’t see it. The severing of means and ends that defines most of academia is felt deeply in this book. Full surrogacy now!
July 9, 2024
exploded my brain impregnated my brain cut everything open and sewed it all back together. repro-utopia is going to be great, y'all.
Read
August 8, 2022Whew—this book was theory-forward and a lot of it went over my head. At the same time, though, Lewis had so many interesting ideas about how surrogacy as it exists today (and labor militancy among surrogates) ought to influence how we think about families and kinship more broadly, especially as they relate to capitalism.
I think the cleanest summary of Lewis’s goals is stated near the end of the introduction: “Let’s bring about the conditions of possibility for open-source, fully collaborative gestation. Let’s prefigure a way of manufacturing one another noncompetitively. Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notions of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities. Let us build a care commune based on comradeship, a world sustained by kith and kind more than by kin. Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the ‘family’” (26).
In getting to the point of why we need “full surrogacy,” how we might get there, and what stands in the way, Lewis covers an astonishing amount of theoretical ground, and draws from a delightful assortment of disciplines. She explains placental biology! She analyzes The Handmaid’s Tale! Most notably, she dives deeply into a set of ethnographies of Nayna Patel’s Akanksha Infertility Clinic, through which she explores the conflicting narratives around transnational surrogacy and uses these contradictions as openings for supporting surrogates as workers (in the short term) and communizing reproduction (in the long term).
Most excitingly to me, Lewis gives dozens of examples of nonpropertarian, not-necessarily-biological kinship practices, and explains what differentiates a communal, anticapitalist family/community structure from a nonnuclear family structure that nonetheless doesn’t meaningfully represent family abolition. (For the former, she gives the example of open adoptions and queer coparenting communities; for the latter, she gives the example of Dr. Patel’s for-profit, non-cooperativized surrogacy dormitories, which house women away from their husbands and children but under the complete control of their boss.) It raised a lot of helpful questions about what is useful about nonnuclear family structures and how to realize their radical potential.
I think the cleanest summary of Lewis’s goals is stated near the end of the introduction: “Let’s bring about the conditions of possibility for open-source, fully collaborative gestation. Let’s prefigure a way of manufacturing one another noncompetitively. Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notions of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities. Let us build a care commune based on comradeship, a world sustained by kith and kind more than by kin. Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the ‘family’” (26).
In getting to the point of why we need “full surrogacy,” how we might get there, and what stands in the way, Lewis covers an astonishing amount of theoretical ground, and draws from a delightful assortment of disciplines. She explains placental biology! She analyzes The Handmaid’s Tale! Most notably, she dives deeply into a set of ethnographies of Nayna Patel’s Akanksha Infertility Clinic, through which she explores the conflicting narratives around transnational surrogacy and uses these contradictions as openings for supporting surrogates as workers (in the short term) and communizing reproduction (in the long term).
Most excitingly to me, Lewis gives dozens of examples of nonpropertarian, not-necessarily-biological kinship practices, and explains what differentiates a communal, anticapitalist family/community structure from a nonnuclear family structure that nonetheless doesn’t meaningfully represent family abolition. (For the former, she gives the example of open adoptions and queer coparenting communities; for the latter, she gives the example of Dr. Patel’s for-profit, non-cooperativized surrogacy dormitories, which house women away from their husbands and children but under the complete control of their boss.) It raised a lot of helpful questions about what is useful about nonnuclear family structures and how to realize their radical potential.
October 21, 2022
The rare academese-drenched, book-length Lefty Critique that I manage to find charming and engrossing, even as a total newcomer to the topic.
A big factor working in its favor is that Lewis has read Gender Theorists big and small, sure: but she's also read and watched a lot of primary documents by and about surrogates, across classes and nationalities. There are bewildering quotes from Donna Harraway, but also from military wives on a surrogacy-centered message board. The prominence of facts-on-the-ground makes the Theory it shares space with in each chapter not just tolerable, but dare I say... coherent and relevant?
An illustration of the nice balance between self-indulgence and readability: sure, she uses a self-invented, esoteric term like "amniotechnics". But, crucially, she clarifies that the term is her own when she introduces it, and spends much of that chapter explaining what it is and why we should care (unlike Harroway, whose whimsical self-invented terms [in my uninformed and irrelevant opinion] crowd the writing even worse than the proper nouns of lore in Tolkien).
But in the end, did it leave me feeling like a flag-waving Biological Family Abolitionist? Ehhhhh - maybe not. I think there's just not enough space given in the book for Lewis to persuasively connect her research focus of surrogacy with her political convictions re communism, family abolition, and poly-maternalism, connected though they very well may be. As much as I subscribe to the idea that practical, incremental dreams and demands aren't sufficient on their own to achieve practical, incremental progress – that we really do need the dreamers with outrageous demands and an unquenchable thirst for justice at the table for incremental progress to have a shot at being the "pragmatic compromise" - it's hard to feel excited about amniotechnics in a country where concrete, basic rights like universal healthcare and paid parental leave beckon for our attention and energy in achieving.
A big factor working in its favor is that Lewis has read Gender Theorists big and small, sure: but she's also read and watched a lot of primary documents by and about surrogates, across classes and nationalities. There are bewildering quotes from Donna Harraway, but also from military wives on a surrogacy-centered message board. The prominence of facts-on-the-ground makes the Theory it shares space with in each chapter not just tolerable, but dare I say... coherent and relevant?
An illustration of the nice balance between self-indulgence and readability: sure, she uses a self-invented, esoteric term like "amniotechnics". But, crucially, she clarifies that the term is her own when she introduces it, and spends much of that chapter explaining what it is and why we should care (unlike Harroway, whose whimsical self-invented terms [in my uninformed and irrelevant opinion] crowd the writing even worse than the proper nouns of lore in Tolkien).
But in the end, did it leave me feeling like a flag-waving Biological Family Abolitionist? Ehhhhh - maybe not. I think there's just not enough space given in the book for Lewis to persuasively connect her research focus of surrogacy with her political convictions re communism, family abolition, and poly-maternalism, connected though they very well may be. As much as I subscribe to the idea that practical, incremental dreams and demands aren't sufficient on their own to achieve practical, incremental progress – that we really do need the dreamers with outrageous demands and an unquenchable thirst for justice at the table for incremental progress to have a shot at being the "pragmatic compromise" - it's hard to feel excited about amniotechnics in a country where concrete, basic rights like universal healthcare and paid parental leave beckon for our attention and energy in achieving.
September 17, 2025
What’s all this then? I was wheezing and panting chasing after her meaning through so many burrowing tangents. She’s done a lot of reading but not every citation contributed to her points. And every sentence was so laden with qualifiers and jabs I couldn’t pick them all up like a hawk-proof chihuahua. Maybe that was a British thing. Style aside, very stimulating ideas are presented here. It’s better to imagine something entirely new, not just things exactly how they are just with more abortions. Or god forbid fewer abortions. I hate when people say stuff like, we wouldn’t need to have abortions if blah blah blah. More!!! More! Lowki though I couldn’t really see what she was imagining concretely. What if this was structured more like “A Modest Proposal”? It feels like a good time to start writing prescriptively. Tick tock, people…
March 22, 2024
I love an academic book that takes a stand as firm as this one does. Lewis points out how much energy we're spending on fundamentally the wrong questions. It's not a debate of who "counts" as a child's parents, but why we need someone to "count" at all. Why we need a child to belong to someone specific instead of belonging with all of us, collectively not only reproducing, but raising humanity. I can feel the fury in this text. I can feel the love even more. I will definitely be re-reading this text, and hopefully all the amazing thinkers that Lewis diligently references and cites as the co-authors of her own work
October 22, 2021
This book made me think through some things I hadn't ever considered. Surrogacy, for one. I didn't realize the transglobal nature of the surrogacy market. Sophie Lewis does well to illuminate the subject and question the premises advanced by the surrogacy entrepreneurs.
Also, after many years in the left I had never really encountered the reproductive justice theorists. The book gave me lots to chew on and family abolition is a topic I'll be reading more on, perhaps starting with the article in Endnotes 5.
Also, after many years in the left I had never really encountered the reproductive justice theorists. The book gave me lots to chew on and family abolition is a topic I'll be reading more on, perhaps starting with the article in Endnotes 5.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 126 reviews