Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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Often, we think of surrogacy as the problem, but, Full Surrogacy Now argues, we need more surrogacy, not less! Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Full Surrogacy Now makes a significant contribution to the pressing political project of advocating for the rights of those workers whose labour is so often delegitimised, exploited and criminalised. Lewis blames capitalism, a system in which, she argues, everyone needs a home team—people to root for, and to fall back on when things go south. It draws all pregnant people, and also those who support pregnant people (that is, all of us), rather than only those engaged in the niche practice of surrogacy, into the discussion.

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.The title – Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family – sounds like a right-wing parody of feminism and accordingly has been misinterpreted and provoked enraged YouTube videos and comments from people who have not read the book. In this way, the core thesis seems to be a solution developed in isolation from the surrogates (indeed all pregnant people) it largely affects.

A portion of the book studies the Akanksha Fertility Clinic, in India, a surrogacy center that, according to Lewis, severely underpays and mistreats its workers.Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). Can we explicitly ask hitherto middle-class white persons with wombs to take on their fair share of gestation, if their contribution is decently rewarded and it is socially valuable? These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Lewis thus joins a range of feminists, from liberal to radical, who have targeted the family as unjust (for example, Mill Reference Mill1869; Chodorow Reference Chodorow1978; Okin Reference Okin1989; Coontz Reference Coontz1992).

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.Read it and let’s imagine different constellations of care, love and family beyond the conservative restraint of supposed biology. The Farm” does not take a clear stance on the ethics of surrogacy itself, but, like Lewis’s book, it makes a mockery of Mae’s claim that such a job is “a gateway to a better life. But Lewis does a stellar job at explaining and exploring these alongside a beautiful array of literary and pop culture references. Underpinning much of these discussions of gestational surrogacy is Lewis’s interrogation of the moralising discourse about whether surrogacy should be allowed and whether it is right, which mimic similar discussions around sex work. 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.