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Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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Mae is biracial (her father is Chinese), and she sees the Hosts as co-travellers on her journey of upward mobility. Many of the women are former domestic workers or nannies or health aides, and have found that caring for a fetus is more lucrative than caring for a person. In a particularly important critique of The Handmaid’s Tale and responses to it, Lewis warns that ‘the pleasures of an extremist misogyny defined as womb-farming risk concealing from us what are simply slower and less photogenic forms of violence, such as race, class, and binary gender itself’ (14).

Lewis fantasizes about replacing the modern family with a “classless commune,” where children don’t belong to anyone—a commune that would eventually render commercial surrogacy obsolete. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.For example, if immediately, then we continue to exploit surrogates in the terrible ways outlined; if in the end state, then we desist from all surrogacy and remove work options from surrogates until then. What especially frustrates Lewis is that, despite the obvious sacrifices of pregnancy and of being away from family, the Akanksha clinicians and clients are still skittish about referring to surrogacy as “work. 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. It offers both a convincing polemic about surrogacy's past and present, and a vision of how to make it both more common and more mutually beneficial. 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.

Full Surrogacy Now is more than an intervention, it is a landmark text of visionary feminist thinking.Commercial surrogacy, the practice of paying a woman to carry and birth a child whom she will not parent, is largely unregulated in America.

Neither simply natural nor banally cultural, gestation appears as the unthought core of gender and sexual politics, and the key of a forthcoming womb revolution: trans-Marx meets mammals politics! Yet these are still within the confines of the family structure—in the Philippines case, for instance, some sense of the family unit, with a father and siblings, remains intact—which is the type of arrangement Lewis worries about. 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. Once their demands for better conditions and collectives have been met, Lewis suggests surrogates are the ones likely to want wider reproductive justice: “Families who have helped other families might enact ongoing kinship though forms of solidarity more meaningful than payment” (147). The visceral stew of queer feminist communist political theory and the biotechnological birthing discussion are sometimes difficult to read.

It argues that capital pushes us to see genetic babies as private property—we personalize and thereby commodify all babies (116)—and that this undermines a more communal approach to organizing society. In other words, if it “takes a village” to raise a child, then why don’t we will such a village into existence? But Lewis does a stellar job at explaining and exploring these alongside a beautiful array of literary and pop culture references. 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.

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