Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family
By: Emma Long
Full Surrogacy Now is a 2019 book written by Sophie Lewis, critic, theorist, translator, and author from the UK based in Philadelphia. Lewis is a radical queer anti-work feminist, anti-fascist, Marxist, hydrofeminist, and cyborg ecologist. Full Surrogacy is her first published book.
Vocabulary:
Gestation: The carrying/creation of a fetus/child within the womb from conception to birth.
Surrogacy: When a person with female reproductive capacities bears a child for another person/couple.
Traditional Surrogacy: The surrogate is artificially inseminated with a donor’s or the prospective father’s sperm and uses her own egg in the fertilization process. The baby is thereby genetically related to the surrogate.
Gestational Surrogacy: A fertilized egg or embryo is placed within the surrogate, who carries the baby to term. The baby is of no genetic relation to the surrogate.
Commercial Surrogacy: Any arrangement where the surrogate is paid more than reimbursement for medical services.
Altruistic Surrogacy: Any arrangement where the surrogate does not receive any monetary compensation. Often the surrogate is a close friend or family member of intended parents.
Neoliberal: Favoring free-market capitalism.
Bootstrap: Myth that states all people, no matter economic or social status, can “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and become successful.
Kin/ship: Of genetic relation, related.
Kith: Friends, acquaintances, relations.
The surrogacy industry profits an estimated 1 billion dollars a year, with megastars such as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, and recently Anderson Cooper, using surrogates to carry their children (and receiving heavy criticism for it). While it’s no uncommon line of work, commercial surrogacy is illegal and restricted in many parts of the world: in many U.S. states, Thailand, Mexico, the UK, and newly in India (where fertility tourism brought in $400 million yearly) to name a few.
The industry is rife with abuse, underpayment, and exploitation. Often, commercial surrogacy is defined by elaborate non-liability clauses (frequently withheld from surrogates and often given to those with the inability to read them), middlemen, and frequently traumatic, premature, and heavily sedated births. Babies are almost always delivered early by C- section, where surrogates risk years of infection and scarring. Women are given very little freedom in their ability to terminate the pregnancy at their own will, or control over their bodies during the pregnancy.
The modern surrogacy industry is defined by distance, brought on by anxiety from high profile cases such as Baby M and the trial of Anna Johnson. Now, much gestational work is exported to the Global South, while infertile couples of the Global North can expect the arrival of their child, with the womb and person it grows in out of sight and out of mind. One of these famous surrogacy agencies of the Global South is Akanksha, run by Dr. Patel- a self-proclaimed feminist and miracle-worker. Lewis focuses specifically on this agency for much of the book, describing contradictions in Patel’s beliefs, her false promises to surrogates, and general exploitation of gestational workers in her clinic. She is heavily criticized for her philanthrocapitalism: “doing well by doing good,” and valuing entrepreneurship as an anti-poverty strategy. As Lewis argues, much of commercial surrogacy favors a “neoliberal bootstrap individualism,” and builds from the idea that infertility is “death.”
“‘Full Surrogacy Now,’ as I see it, is an expression of solidarity with the evolving desires of gestational workers, from the point of view of a struggle against work.”
“Surrogacy needs to change beyond recognition.” While she presents the reader with many negatives of the surrogacy industry, Lewis does not argue for its erasure nor the end of surrogacy. In fact, she argues for the opposite: full surrogacy: “surrogacy for the surrogates by the surrogates.” The alienation of this line of work (as surrogacy must be recognized as legitimate work), and it’s illegality only fuels further abuse and exploitation of surrogates. Surrogates do not see themselves as victims of their work, or as people brutalized by their pregnancies. Yet they are treated as “helpmeet rather than kin;” people who must be “saved” from their profession.
In countries with bans on commercial surrogacy, altruistic surrogacy is still completely legal in most cases. Altruistic surrogacy often causes situations wherein housekeepers or working-class women are pressured by infertile upper-class couples to bear their children. And the outlawing of commercial surrogacy does not in any way stop it from occurring: “surrogacy bans fuel, not halt the baby trade,” Lewis argues. Clinicians work through the illegality of the practice by moving surrogates across borders. Like sex work, surrogacy will not go away with a ban or law prohibiting the trade How can you eradicate a profession that’s been practiced since BCE? And like sex work, with the legalization of surrogacy will come safer, more empowering working conditions for surrogates and better regulation of the industry.
Lewis tears into anti-surrogacy advocates, exposing much of their essentialist undertones and trans and queer exclusive language. Much of their reasoning reflects a “fear of the fragility of the mother-child bond.” She notes the problematic themes in their work, in their ideas of “fetal motherhood” that believe gestation is the “pinnacle of wholeness and self-realization.”
Lewis’s work is radically inclusive. In a field (fertility and childbirth) where gender and motherhood are so incredibly essentialized and trans and queer exclusive, she makes sure to outline her use of language. “Precision is important,” writes Lewis, “because there can be no utopian thought on reproduction that doesn’t involve uncoupling gestation from the gender binary.” She makes careful work to reduce her use of the terms “woman” and “female” and replace them with language such as “pregnant people.”
“The whole world deserves to reap the benefits of available techniques monopolized by capitalism’s elite.”
Before surrogacy is legalized (or in the places that it is legalized but not recognized), it must be recognized as a legitimate form of work. “Recognizing pregnancy as a productive care labor is not a solution, but opens up the idea that pregnancy workers can bargain, commit sabotage, and go on strike.” And most importantly, by recognizing gestation as work, Lewis hopes to question the sexist capitalistic structures that decide what can and cannot be deemed as work. In fact, she notes “I’m not proud that gestation makes an economic contribution. It would be better if it contributed to the world’s destruction.” Wages for all gestational work is not an appeal or final destination, but a “process of assault on wage society.”
Lewis lets herself sit in the contradictions of her defense of surrogacy. She presents her argument in strikingly honest terms, noting the incomplete state of this book she has written in collaboration with her predecessors. “Authorship can only be co-authorship.” Lewis does not only accredit this work to herself but the multitudes of feminist scholars and surrogacy advocates who paved the way for her work. She calls herself a “disloyal, monstrous, chimerical daughter” of second-wave feminists who inspired much of her work (while also criticizing their exclusivity and problematic tendencies) and borrows inspiration from 1970s feminist science fiction in her visions of inclusive gestation. Foundational texts for Lewis’ work include Simone de Beauvior’s The Second Sex, Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex.
“The genesis of children is the ultimate commodity fetish.”
Many of these science-fiction inspirations are reflected in her utopian vision for the future. “In order to implement a revolutionary critique of surrogacy, we need to interrogate its relationship with the notion of natural kinship.” This destruction that Lewis would hope surrogacy could help bring on, would be one that would result in a world freed from oppressive capitalist structures, including the family itself. “Let us build a care commune based on comradeship, a world sustained by kith and kind more than kin.” She calls for this radical kinship, as all humans are tied together and connected in powerful ways, biologically or not. In her arguments against a traditional nuclear family structure, she draws from her own experience- citing her difficult relationships with both her mother and father- her parent’s contentious relationship, her father’s misogyny, his denial of her rape at 13. The family is a site for patriarchal and oppressive violence, as bell hooks describes in Feminism is for Everybody, and the subduing of female independence, as Emma Goldman writes in Love and Marriage. Family structures provide, in many cases, toxic, unwelcoming environments for its members. Many have already begun to start caregiving communes, as many queer people and other marginalized groups must build their own chosen families for their survival.
Lewis argues that current nuclear family structures work to support capitalistic structures- as family wealth is passed down only through biological family lineages, concentrating and keeping wealth in the top 1% of our class hierarchy. Family structures pay into a system of exploiting people of color (nannies and housekeepers who labor within the nuclear family household) and disowning queer children. It is the “institution tasked with producing radical ethnically marked identities and expressing the organized regulatory violence known as gender.”
Lewis notes her work is unfinished- still to be built on and refined for years. There does seem to be a sense of this incompleteness in the book. While her beliefs in the abolition of the family are by far the most discussed and quoted parts of her book, very little of it actually focuses on these thoughts. It truly is a book about surrogacy, with family abolition provided briefly as a solution, in a way that suggests an unfinished quality to her work.
The whole book serves as a sort of stream of informed consciousness. It isn’t organized in an entirely linear manner and often jumps back and forth between stories and arguments- as if the reader is adrift on the waves of Lewis’ thoughts. While I would normally criticize this arranging of her thoughts as disorganized, her radical questioning of the powers-that-be made me question this very thought. Who is it that decides that books must be neat and simple to follow? Perhaps she was rebelling against these very ideas. Full Surrogacy, while short, is not a light read. Pages are packed with evidence and scholarly jargon. While it proves Lewis is highly educated in her views, it causes a certain level of inaccessibility. I had to be highly concentrated to understand much of the highly academic language. This type of work is not easily approachable to the general public, as many won’t be able to pick up this book on a whim and read it with ease.
The book is packed with insightful musings questioning the structures we have in place and deconstructs complex issues such as surrogacy. It is truly a text that cannot be described in simple descriptions such as above and deserves much debate and space in feminist discourse. There’s been too many quotes and insights of Lewis’s work that I could discuss for pages on end, but then, I feel like to understand this radical work, it must be read. And it should be read by every man, woman, and child who calls themselves a feminist, for it provides revolutionary insights into surrogacy, pregnancy, parenthood, and the family that have been lost within feminist discourse.
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It is still perhaps easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family.”
Works Cited
“Family Abolition | Sophie Lewis.” Youtube, Uploaded by Verso Books, June 4, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LooLW4sTXk
“Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family | Sophie Lewis in conversation with Verso Books.” Youtube, Uploaded by Verso Books, June 4, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yqoZjRIfCY
Goldman, Emma. “Marriage and Love.” Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings, by Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, McGraw-Hill Education, 2015, pp. 452–454.
Haberman, Clyde. “Baby M and the Question of Surrogate Motherhood.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 23 Mar. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/us/baby-m-and-the-question-of-surrogate-motherhood.html.
Hooks, Bell. “Ending Violence.” Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by Bell Hooks, W. Ross MacDonald School Resource Services Library, 2016, pp. 61–66.
Lewis, Sophie. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family. Verso, 2019.
Mydans, Seth. “Surrogate Denied Custody Of Child.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 23 Oct. 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/10/23/us/surrogate-denied-custody-of-child.html.
“Overview of the Surrogacy Process.” Human Rights Campaign, www.hrc.org/resources/overview -of-the-surrogacy-process.