Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

The surrogacy industry is worth an estimated 1 billion dollars a year, and many of its surrogates work in terrible conditions, while many gestate babies for no pay at all. Should it be illegal to pay someone to gestate a baby for you? Full Surrogacy Now brings a fresh and unique perspective to the debate. Rather than making surrogacy illegal or allowing it to continue as is, Sophie Lewis argues we should be looking to radically transform it. Surrogates should be put front and center, and their rights to the babies they gestate should be expanded to acknowledge that they are more than mere vessels. In doing so we can break down our assumptions that children necessarily belong to those whose genetics they share. This might sound like a radical proposal but expanding our idea of who children belong to would be a good thing. Taking collective responsibility for children, rather than only caring for the ones we share DNA with, would radically transform notions of kinship. Adopting this expanded concept of surrogacy helps us to see that it always, as the saying goes, takes a village to raise a child.

Bio :

Dr. Sophie Lewis is an Anglo-German, Philadelphia-based scholar, writer, theorist, translator and the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019). Her work focuses on eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminism, queer and trans social reproduction, Black feminist family abolitionism, hydrofeminism, postgenomics, and Marxist-feminist accounts of care. Since 2014, academic publications by Sophie Lewis have appeared in journals such as Signs, Frontiers, Gender Place & Culture, Antipode, Feminism & Psychology, Feminist Review, Science as Culture, and Dialogues in Human Geography. Her non-academic writing, including an op-ed on “How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans”; a critical tribute to Donna Haraway (“Cthulhu Plays No Role For Me”); and a contribution to hydrofeminist theory (“Amniotechnics”) can be found in newspapers and magazines including Viewpoint, Salvage Quarterly, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, Mute, Red Pepper, Boston Review, The London Review of Books, The New Socialist, Logic, and The New York Times. She is a member of the ecological writing collective Out of the Woods, which publishes in forums such as The New Inquiry and Commune, and an editor at Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry.