Sophie Lewis

The surrogacy industry is worth over 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 centre, and their rights towards the babies they gestate should be expanded to acknowledge that surrogates are more than mere vessels. In doing so, we 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 see that it always, as the saying goes, takes a village to raise a child.

What if everyone was family? We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be places of love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. In this urgent, incisive pamphlet, leaving feminist critic Sophie Lewis introduces the idea of family abolition as a question of universalizing and generalizing the good things about our families. In this short and exhilarating text, Sophie Lewis takes the reader through the various histories of family abolition, from utopian socialists to queer, Black and indigenous feminists and into the future, imagining what life might be like after the family. Radical and utopian as it undeniably is, family abolition is the real movement working to undo the care austerity that fundamentally structures life under racial capitalism. The argument for family abolition has become even clearer under COVID 19 where the myth of the nuclear unit has been seen to be a fiction. We were told to keep a 'social distance' (from everyone... except family). Consequently, those without family were left alone, isolated and abandoned. There is no justice in these rules, which keep loved ones from being with one another, treat children like property, and shore up wealth (or poverty) within a class. What is the alternative?