Why are we so committed to the traditional biological family when so many children feel stymied and exhausted by their parents, and so many parents feel stymied and exhausted by their children? 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.

This kind of gestation depends on realizing the implications of knowing that we all actually, materially, make one another, and that this labor continues to be exploited, extracted, and alienated-unequally-at every turn in Capitalism and Patriarchy.

Lewis’s exploration of these moral and legal discourses reminded me of the wonderful book Revolting Prostitutes (Juno Mac and Molly Smith, 2018), as both works advocate decriminalisation and emphasise the importance of centring workers’ rights, rather than the tendency to use sex workers or surrogates as political footballs in abstract discussions of the reproductive or sexual rights of some privileged women. While much of the book does focus on the work of surrogates within global class relations, this is only part of her discussion about surrogacy as a much broader concept. Her goal could hardly be more ambitious: to rethink the "natural" gestation that every one of us comes from. It offers both a convincing polemic about surrogacy’s past and present, and a vision of how to make it both more common and more mutually beneficial. In an interview with Verso, Lewis explains that family abolition is ‘about the proliferation of relationships of care’, which she has also written about extensively in her many other articles for outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation , Jacobin , Red Pepper and others.

And, for Lewis, even in the most open-minded arrangement, where the surrogate remains in the child’s life, the basic family structure remains the same. For a business that deals in common ingredients and a mature technology, surrogacy is curiously expensive. None of these comments are meant to be destructive to the project of proliferating caring relations in a more communal way but rather constructive to it. Once their demands for better conditions and collectives have been met, Lewis suggests surrogates are the ones likely to want wider reproductive justice: “Families who have helped other families might enact ongoing kinship though forms of solidarity more meaningful than payment” (147).

Lewis notes not all people who could get pregnant would do this work now, just as not all those who could be brain surgeons or trash collectors would take up that work, and we can suppose this extends to a reproductive commune. Going by the ethos of the book, these are for all of us to address, if we think the vision is worth pursuing. From the opening line, ‘It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us’ (1) to the closing words, ‘the promise of the reproductive commune’ (168), Lewis provides a brave and incredibly interesting exploration of what it means to birth and care in relation to others. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Sophie Lewis is at the top of a new generation of scholars and activists thinking the transformation of gestational labor within contemporary pharmacopornographic capitalism.

But this would be somewhat of a romanticization of families in the vision; a romanticization that Lewis, at the same time, wants to avoid about pregnancy or the family. The section reflecting on this position is excellent (25-26), showing that those who have no personal experience of a topic can, of course, still do excellent scholarship that platforms workers’ rights and activist demands alongside imagining radical utopian futures.For instance, one could push for devaluing genetic ties by eliminating surrogacy because it was created to prioritize and continue our esteem for genetic relatedness. I need it; it fills my whole self with reimagined possibilities for making oddkin who are not property.

Second, there are multiple aims in the book that, when taken together, appear somewhat at odds or their relation unclear. by placing reproductive labour at the centre of her vision in Full Surrogacy Now, Lewis confronts a central issue that continues to be sidelined in the male-dominated field of futurism. It offers both a convincing polemic about surrogacy's past and present, and a vision of how to make it both more common and more mutually beneficial. If it is all labor, then how can that labor be freed from now global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation? In these regards, the issue is not about being pro or anti surrogacy, but about improving working conditions (44).There is evidence of people of color in, for example, Cameroon, the Philippines, and Nigeria already raising children in a “polymaternal” (150) way, with multiple and informal caregiving in these communities.