Full Surrogacy Now

Feminism Against Family

Hardcover, 240 pages

English language

Published May 7, 2019 by Verso Books.

ISBN:
978-1-78663-731-4
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
1048943672
Goodreads:
4346385
4 stars (1 review)

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 …

1 edition

For the collectivisation of babymaking

4 stars

Commercial surrogacy is not a radical, qualitative change in modes of reproduction, since children are already treated to some extent as commodities and, crucially reproductive labour is already unfairly distributed, among genders, classes, races and geographies. Two implications follows: first, commercial surrogacy is wrong only in the sense that is an acute manifestation of broader problems; second, we should treat surrogacy as work, e.g. alienated labour: "I am sympathetic to the impulse, in that the advancing frontier of commodification elicits, in so many of us, a form of recoil that feels almost beyond words. I think I get it. We refuse the concept that the most precious things should be for sale, as though that will change the reality that—exploitatively, yet consensually—they are".

Where I felt the book falls short, or maybe just irritates me, is in the righteous take down of diverging positions, especially since it comes from a …

Subjects

  • Sociology
  • Feminism
  • Gender
  • Queer
  • Philosophy