Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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Warren laughed when I recited this over the phone. Lewis’s approach to culture “allows you to see things as they are,” she said. “It’s such a wonderful feeling to have someone point out things you don’t even realize you’ve accepted as ‘normal.’”

She also showed me one of the zines she and Osterweil gave to guests at their wedding, which include speeches from friends and promises to each other. The latter could not properly be called “vows,” because they are in fact disavowals: of the institution of marriage, the biological family, and the dysfunction that both can breed. (They had a more traditional ceremony in Boston, at the request of Osterweil’s mother.) The full title of Sophie Lewis’s book: Full Surrogacy Now, Feminism Against Family points to how very capacious this text is. But it should also be an immediate signal to readers that this book, which is a book about labor, is not just a call for an improvement in surrogate worker conditions such that commercial surrogacy (and the family form that it maintains) can be defended. Silvia Federici, among others in the Wages For Housework Movement, was explicit that the demand for wages was about more than delivering recognition, improved material conditions and increased autonomy for women in the home (although that too); it was about demanding something impossible for capitalism to meet, which would thus require dramatic societal reconfiguration and redistribution.

We need a radical overhaul of the surrogacy industry

In Lewis's utopian future, the family as we know it no longer exists. Everyone, regardless of gender, is a surrogate; we mother each other. Incisive and exciting … a must-read for those interested in queer feminist engagements with family, reproductive labour and global class relations. ” Lewis takes one of the most everyday things about being human and thinks it through from the point of view of a cyborg communism. This book goes far into places where few gender abolitionists have ventured and brings us a vision of another life.” What I appreciate most about it is the way it refuses the c A truly egalitarian feminism, Lewis argues, must extend the feminist challenge to sex stereotypes all the way to the origins of life itself. As long as we believe there’s a special bond between women, gestation, and the desire to care for the resulting baby, the sexes can never be exactly equal. So all these must be eliminated. Doing this, she suggests, will open a space for new, communitarian forms of family unconstrained by gender, embodiment, or oppressive bourgeois norms.

In her 2002 memoir, “ Love Works Like This,” the writer and psychologist Lauren Slater discovers that she is pregnant and decides to list the pros and cons of parenthood. Under cons, she writes: “Less time for friends, less time for work, less money, famous women writers who had children?” The list goes on. Under pros, she has just one item: “Learning a new kind of love.” She ends up keeping the baby. We need to move away from the focus on abortion as just a form of health-care, or arguments around when human life begins, and defend abortion as a right to stop doing gestational work. Nonetheless, Lewis sees glimmers of this future everywhere. When she is surrounded by her partner and her friends, she sees that she is “mothered by many.” They are not her biological relatives, but they are each other’s kin in an even truer sense: They have chosen to care for each other without the dictates of the nuclear family structure. In Lewis’ feminist utopia, family has not vanished; it has become more wild, more abundant, and less constrained. 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. Lewis’s exploration of these moral and legal discourses reminded me of the wonderful book Revolting Prostitutes (Juno Mac and Molly Smith, 2018), as both works advocate decriminalisation and emphasise the importance of centring workers’ rights, rather than the tendency to use sex workers or surrogates as political footballs in abstract discussions of the reproductive or sexual rights of some privileged women. While Revolting Prostitutes was written by two sex workers, Lewis clearly situates herself as a researcher who has not worked as a surrogate or given birth. The section reflecting on this position is excellent (25-26), showing that those who have no personal experience of a topic can, of course, still do excellent scholarship that platforms workers’ rights and activist demands alongside imagining radical utopian futures. Full Surrogacy Now arrived and I could not stop reading. The crises of our time are crises of reproduction. 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. But the gestator? Lewis moves expertly through decades of debates, as well as a rapidly growing body of empirical research, on surrogacy to carry us beyond the by-now familiar refrain that this or that activity ‘is work.’ Her goal could hardly be more ambitious: to rethink the ‘natural’ gestation that every one of us comes from. I will reread this book for the sense it gives me that new ways of making one another and the world new might, in fact, be possible. Its verve and wit make me feel sure that Lewis’ reproductive commune will be fun.”Commercial surrogacy, the practice of paying a woman to carry and birth a child whom she will not parent, is largely unregulated in America. It’s illegal, with rare exceptions, in three states: New York, Louisiana, and Michigan. But, most states have no surrogacy laws at all. Though the technology was invented in 1986, the concept still seems, for many, a bit sci-fi, and support for it does not follow obvious political fault lines. It is typically championed by the gay-rights community, who see it as the only reproductive technology that allows gay men to have biological children, and condemned by some feminists, who see it as yet another business that exploits the female body. In June, when the New York State Assembly considered a bill that would legalize paid surrogacy, Gloria Steinem vigorously opposed it. “Under this bill, women in economic need become commercialized vessels for rent, and the fetuses they carry become the property of others,” Steinem wrote in a statement.

There’s another, to my mind much less convincing, line of objection, which says that capitalism has already abolished the family and that, therefore, the task of anticapitalists is to defend it. It’s as though Marx and Engels didn’t themselves call for the positive project of family abolition. It’s very strange to me, the active forgetting of the once-familiar socialist demand ‘abolish the family’. But Melinda Cooper is an excellent antidote: her recent theoretic history, Family Values, shows that the core social unit of contemporary capitalism in the USA is very much the family—specifically, the family in perpetual crisis. Misreading this ‘crisis’ as demise, parts of the left have lately returned to lamenting it, blaming ‘feminism’ for the breakdown of the family and the triumph of atomization, anti-dependency and precarity. But, to quote the brilliant Sarah Brouillette: Sophie Lewis is a water based entity in Philadelphia. In addition to Full Surrogacy Now, Lewis has translated works including Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak (MIT, 2016), Unterscheiden und Herrschen by Sabine Hark and Paula-Irene Villa (Verso, 2020), and A Brief History of Feminism by Antje Schrupp (MIT, 2017). She is a member of the Out of the Woods collective, whose first book is to be published by Common Notions in 2019, an editor at Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, and a queer feminist geographer committed to cyborg ecology and anti-fascism. Further writings, on subjects ranging from Donna Haraway to dating, have been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, Viewpoint Magazine, Signs, Dialogues in Human Geography, Antipode, Feminism & Psychology, Science as Culture, Frontiers, The New Inquiry, Jacobin, Mute and Salvage Quarterly. The principal obstacle to her utopia is the danger that human nature might not be a self-serving invention of white cisheteropatriarchy after all, but an irreducible fact of our existence. And if, in fact, human nature does exist, Lewis’s book is to be condemned for the idealistic coloration it affords what would then be a vision straight out of a horror movie: the technologically-enabled push to demolish all bonds of given, unconditional love—even of a mother for her baby.

Slim is preoccupied by his “legacy,” which he initially sees as something that can exist only through a biological lineage. But at the end of the film, having made the choice to abandon his family to start a new life with Queen, he tells her that she’s his legacy. As with much utopian writing, it is difficult to wrap one’s head around some of the ideas. The visceral stew of queer feminist communist political theory and the biotechnological birthing discussion are sometimes difficult to read. But Lewis does a stellar job at explaining and exploring these alongside a beautiful array of literary and pop culture references. 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). While the horrific bodily violations depicted in Margaret Atwood’s novel and the TV programme are an emotive rallying point for many feminists, these cannot erase the raced, classed and trans-exclusionary histories of reproductive rights struggles and imaginings of ‘universal womanhood’ rooted in biology. An instructive and moving book about the work of babymaking and the best possible future for birthing and raising children. 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. Lewis treats surrogacy as a signal example of what will be integral to any common human flourishing to come: unmaking gender and the family as we know them, to build new kinds of sociality and care for what is not ‘biologically’‘ours.’ I was floored by it.” Full surrogacy now,” “another surrogacy is possible”: to the extent that these interchangeable sentiments imply a revolutionary program (as I’d like them to) I’d propose it be animated by the following invitations. Let’s bring about the conditions of possibility for open-source, fully collaborative gestation. Let’s prefigure a way of manufacturing one another noncompetitively. Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notions of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities. Let us build a care commune based on comradeship, a world sustained by kith and kind more than by kin. Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the “family.” 45

From even the most milquetoast Christian perspective, this argument violates so many foundational beliefs that it would be a straightforward matter to whip my esteemed readers into righteous rage. But Full Surrogacy Now merits more considered engagement than this, for it offers an insight into a worldview that today boasts considerable cultural cachet. A pivotal illustration of how certain Lewis is of the rightness of this task comes in an anecdote, where she recounts asking her father as a child whether he’d still love her if she turned out to be the milkman’s progeny. She fully expected him to say “Of course,” but received instead “stony, awkward silence.” Lewis recounts being so “devastated” by what this implied that “for the rest of the drive, I could not speak.” Implicitly, the instinctive, unconditional love of a parent for his or her genetic children is reframed as something capricious, exclusionary, and unjust. As Sophie puts it: “We are the makers of each other. And we could learn collectively to act like it.” (19) And what she offers is in her words an approach that is “theoretically immoderate, utopian and partisan.” (21) In the interview below, Sophie Lewis explains the ideas and theories behind her work Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. Aliza Shvarts, Posters, 2008/2017. Performance documentation (score, still, and official university statement) from Untitled [Senior Thesis](2008), inkjet prints on paper, 18in x 24in.In response to the project being censored by Yale University, Shvarts did not show any visualdocumentation of Untitled [Senior Thesis]for 10 years. It is visible now onlythrough the lens of her other works. Courtesy of artist. Gestational Fix

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Likewise, I have absolutely no quarrel with the trans-inclusive autonomist midwives and radical doulas, the ones (unlike ProDoulas—see note 23) lobbying for their work to become a guaranteed form of free health care. 20 I have no quarrel with “full-spectrum” birth-work that supports people of all genders through abortion, miscarriage, fertility treatments, labor, and postpartum, often operating outside of biomedical establishments, spreading bottom-up mutual aid, disseminating methods geared toward achieving minimally (that is, sufficiently) medicated, maximally pleasurable reproduction. 21 Quite the contrary: power to them. With their carefully refined systems of education, training, and traditional lay science, they are, in their own way, creating a nature worth fighting for. 22 It can hardly be an accident that, as anyone who spends time in midwifery networks will realize, so many of them are anti-authoritarian communists. 23 Those who’ve read Sophie Lewis’s work prior to Full Surrogacy Now (published in venues ranging from Salvage Quarterly to The New York Times) will already know what side she takes in the face of this great rupture. I think it’s safe to call her output among the most spirited and extended in opposing transphobic feminism, and also so-called ‘sex work abolitionists’. In true Marxist form, Lewis not only attempts to shut down these supposedly radical arguments, but allows their idiosyncrasies to play out, and expose the dysfunctional thinking at work in the positions radical feminists commit to.