Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Paperback

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.

About author(s):Sophie Lewis is a researcher, teacher, free-lance writer, translator and activist. Her ESRC-funded PhD was on the topic of surrogacy at the University of Manchester (UK). She is the author of a chapter in the Palgrave edited collection Intimate Economies (eds Hoffman and Moreno, 2017), of four forthcoming research articles (in Signs, Frontiers, Dialogues in Human Geography and Gender, Place and Culture), an intervention in Feminist Review, and four book reviews in Antipode and Feminism & Psychology. For MIT Press, she has translated Antje Schrupp's A Brief History of Feminism and Bini Adamczak's Communism for Children (with Jacob Blumenfeld). Her non-academic cultural critique appears on several platforms including: Blind Field, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, Mute, Salvage and Viewpoint.