Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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Full Surrogacy Now is more than an intervention, it is a landmark text of visionary feminist thinking. For a novel about the ruthlessness of capitalism, Ramos demonstrates remarkable tenderness for her characters. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.

The details of this could be worked out at a later date, of course, but they are not hinted at here. join[ing] such texts as Juno Mac and Molly Smith s Revolting Prostitutes in combating the white, liberal, trans-exclusionary, whorephobic, feminist discourse which is currently dominating conversations around sex work and gestational labour. 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 mammal's politics! Usual feminist rubbish that desires the end of all things they hate to be replaced with all things sugar and spice.

Her translations include Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak (MIT, 2016, with Jacob Blumenfeld), A Brief History of Feminism by Antje Schrupp (MIT, 2017) and Unterscheiden und Herrschen by Paula-Irene Villa and Sabine Hark (Verso, 2020). Adopting this expanded concept of surrogacy helps us to see that it always, as the saying goes, takes a village to raise a child. This might sound like a radical proposal but expanding our idea of who children belong to would be a good thing. 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.It reveals the sheer effort involved in any pregnancy, how that effort is naturalized, and why we should resist such naturalization since it makes the work being done invisible.

To avoid confusion, I’ll begin by specifying that Sophie Lewis’s argument is not to advocate for an expansion of commercial surrogacy markets, nor to oppose caring relationships, love or children. Lewis rigorously argues for the world she wants to create, but her book is too polemical to rigorously imagine it.Second, there are multiple aims in the book that, when taken together, appear somewhat at odds or their relation unclear. 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. Gestational surrogacy makes it more difficult to name the “biological mother” with complete certainty, and this sort of murkiness strikes Lewis as the best possible world in which to raise children. Lewis could evade this concern by assuming that all future communes worth discussing will be places with such intimate ties simpliciter.