Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family by Sophie Lewis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family by Sophie Lewis Andrew Tolle (bio) Rev. of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family SOPHIE LEWIS Verso, 2019 224 pp. $26.95 (Hardback) ISBN: 9781786637291. Because the title of Sophie Lewis’s debut book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, is intentionally provocative, it is easily misunderstood. After its publication in 2019 by Verso, it prompted backlash from both the right and the left on social media and in editorials, primarily due to her bold attempt to rethink several concepts whose definitions we too often take for granted. These include not only family and surrogacy from the book’s title, but also work, care, and reproduction. In particular, Lewis reimagines family and surrogacy as they relate to the “work of care” and “transgenerational reproduction.” To Lewis, the Global North’s definitions of these terms promote capitalistic exploitation by design. By extension, they erase and exclude marginalized groups who, as Lewis quotes Audrey Lorde, “were not meant to survive” in social frameworks built upon these concepts (151–52). In Full Surrogacy Now, Lewis sets out to expand the history and scope of reproductive technologies, reconsider the surrogacy/ies involved in all human pregnancies, and advocate for viewing pregnancy as work regardless of whether it is commissioned on behalf of others for payment. She calls for imagining “surrogacy” beyond the more recent developments in assisted reproduction technologies because, she asserts, gestational labor has never in human history been “unassisted.” The term “full surrogacy” expresses Lewis’s “solidarity with the [End Page 142] evolving desires of gestational workers, from the point of view of a struggle against work” (28). Such work includes, but is not limited to, the paid labor of private gestational carriers. But Lewis notes that pregnancy was already “techno-fixed” for “lives that really ‘matter’” in capitalism and imperialism, with elite medical care and inaccessible technologies going to the privileged few (3). Wealthy pregnant people have access to reproductive assistance unavailable to most people who do the “work” of pregnancy. This assistance reduces the “rampage” that pregnancies wreak in human bodies—but only for those with access to it. In this way, such pregnancies already involved such concepts as “assisted reproduction” and “reproductive technologies.” The phrase “feminism against family” in her subtitle does not reject family, but rather “The Family.” Lewis rejects the propertarian construct of “the Family” as a private nuclear household that purports to reproduce both autonomously and self-sustainingly, but that cannot achieve that fantasy because it relies on “care work” from outside the unit. Although Lewis, who describes herself as an anti-work communist, pits her ecofeminism against the family by calling for family abolition, she does not reject the formation of kith or kin, nor does she reject the need (or the desire) for transgenerational, reproductive, or co-productive family-making. Indeed, she highlights the benefits of family structures that capitalist repronormativity marginalizes and erases, specifically the kith-making and kin-making among Black, queer, and Indigenous communities. The “Family” must be abolished because it is inextricably tied to white supremacy and is intended to advance capitalism. For Lewis, family abolition “refers to the (necessarily post-capitalist) end of the double-edged coercion whereby the babies we gestate are ours and ours alone, to guard, invest in, and prioritize” at the expense of minoritized people’s ability to participate in that same family-making structure (119). But because it is “necessarily post-capitalist,” she admits that it is an “impossibility.” Adapting Frederick Jameson’s belief that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” she concedes that it is “perhaps easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family” (119). Full surrogacy is distinct from “Surrogacy™,” which is how Lewis refers to the more recently developed industry of privately paid gestational carriers. That history traces back to the 1986 birth of the first baby born via gestational surrogacy, but public consciousness of Surrogacy™ only “began booming” around 2011 as the media began to cover legal developments in the industry more closely. Surrogacy™ exists within the capitalist ideologies that render the “Family” so structurally violent. But Lewis...