Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family

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It reveals the sheer effort involved in any pregnancy, how that effort is naturalized, and why we should resist such naturalization since it makes the work being done invisible. What if we did not fetishise biological connection to children and did reproductive labour more communally? In this way, the core thesis seems to be a solution developed in isolation from the surrogates (indeed all pregnant people) it largely affects. I need it; it fills my whole self with reimagined possibilities for making oddkin who are not property.

According to Lewis, the surrogates usually deliver via C-section when they are thirty-six weeks pregnant, “shaving five weeks or so off production time, delivering the baby just-in-time for collection. Volunteer surrogacy may sound like a perfect way to encourage communal child-rearing, but Lewis says that, in practice, altruistic surrogacy usually has the same dynamic as commercial surrogacy, insofar as a woman still gets pregnant with a wealthier woman’s baby. As part of the aim of proliferating caring relations, Lewis demands that we recognize surrogacy as work, as others have also argued (for example, Shalev Reference Shalev1989; Humbyrd Reference Humbyrd2009; Pande Reference Pande2016; Rudrappa Reference Rudrappa2018). She is a member of the Out of the Woods collective, an editor at Blind Field: a Journal of Cultural Inquiry , and a queer feminist committed to cyborg ecology and anti-fascism.For instance, the analysis is admirably about the ordinary when it deals with the “problem of pregnancy” (1). Can we explicitly ask hitherto middle-class white persons with wombs to take on their fair share of gestation, if their contribution is decently rewarded and it is socially valuable?

Ramos’s richly ambivalent novel leaves the possibility open, even as she details how the Hosts at Golden Oaks are denied basic rights. But, if the vision is ultimately anticapitalist and procommunist, as Lewis argues it is, then the idea of payment, and attaching the norms surrounding the marketplace to surrogacy, seem to make for uncomfortable bedfellows. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Full of brilliant, generative, and also shamelessly biting critique of both bourgeois and communist tracts, feminist and otherwise, Lewis's voice is unique and bracing. For a novel about the ruthlessness of capitalism, Ramos demonstrates remarkable tenderness for her characters.

Akanksha offers surrogates classes in embroidery and candle-making, and its promotional literature assures prospective parents that surrogacy is more than a job—it’s a ladder to a new life. In June, when the New York State Assembly considered a bill that would legalize paid surrogacy, Gloria Steinem vigorously opposed it.

Most of the story takes place at Golden Oaks, an upscale surrogacy clinic in upstate New York where the Hosts, most of them black or Filipina, live in seclusion while they attend to the fetuses growing inside them. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notion of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities. One character in “The Farm,” Ate, tirelessly works as a cook, a maid, and a baby nurse to support her disabled adult son in the Philippines, whom she hasn’t seen for more than twenty years.