Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family by Sophie Lewis (review)

Sophie Lewis's Full Surrogacy Now offers both a blistering polemic against work, the family, and capitalism and a grounded scholarly reflection on the current industry practices and future possibilities of surrogacy. Throughout, Lewis offers various formulations of the title's demand:

"Full surrogacy now" … is an expression of solidarity with the evolving desires of gestational workers, from the point of view of a struggle against work. It names a struggle that, by redistributing the burdens of that labor, dissolves the distinction between reproducers and nonreproducers, mothers and nonmothers, altogether.

(28)

Lewis does not endorse the "marketization" of gestation, or "markets per se" (33). Instead, she supports gestational laborers, not the industry, and argues that "to become ethically acceptable by any noncapitalist standard, surrogacy will have to change beyond recognition. The path to freedom for humanity is a flight from market dependency, and one name for this path is 'full surrogacy'" (33).

Lewis argues that "revolutionaries" must "act to secure, not policy safeguards against Surrogacy™, but rather, incentives to practice real surrogacy, more surrogacy: more mutual aid" (129–30). It is thrilling to be caught up in Lewis's emancipatory polemic, but the field also demands a sober "countereconomism" and "demystification strategy" (76). It also requires the acknowledgment that "pregnancy is bound up with colonialism, white supremacy, capital, and gender—but also resistance" (165).

The threads of the book are woven so closely throughout that to summarize the chapters separately would entail unhelpful simplification. Here, I propose thematic aspects of Full Surrogacy Now that illuminate the intertwinement of a feminist scholarship with utopian feminist polemic. One key question Lewis proposes that may guide us is "What type of social bonds are grounded by which approach to pregnancy?" (8).

One approach Lewis makes is ethnographic and historical, focusing on the real practices and experiences of gestational workers (and their opponents) (11). Lewis describes the "clinic-factory" and analyses the discourse of Dr. Nayna Patel who operates a profitable clinic in Anand, India (6). Lewis dialectically opposes Patel's profit-oriented claims about the experience and condition of her workers (107). Antisurrogacy activists receive short shrift in Lewis's effort to give due regard to the complexity of the workers' situation. She dismisses tactics deployed by activists to spectacularize "womb-farming" that risk "concealing from us what are simply … less photogenic forms of violence, such as race, class and binary gender itself" (14). What Lewis finds is that the activists tacitly support an agenda "more libertarian than liberatory, more morally reproachful than political" (15), suggesting a strange alliance with the SurroMoms Online forum participants who (ironically) "uphold the nuclear family" (133). Both activists and so-called "altruistic" surrogates perpetuate the bifurcated reproductive labor that cultivates "productive maternity among white elites … while simultaneously suppressing an imaginary hyperfecundity among subaltern classes, which they perceived as threatening" (11). It elides the implication of surrogacy with the "interlocking logics of property and sub-humanity, privatization and punishment" in their historical configuration with capitalism (6).

Such recognition contextualizes the medical practices and biological theorizing that inform the approach. Pregnancy, for Lewis, has a "more than one and less than two" ontology (1). In her deidealized portrait, the placenta "'digests' its way into the host's arteries, securing full access to most tissues" in a "rampage" of the gestator's physiology (2). Lewis counters the "thoroughly analytic femmephobia" of many accounts of pregnancy with Bini Adamczak's notion of "circlusion"—the opposite of penetration—"designating 'the same physical process, but from the opposite perspective'" (81). But rather than mystify such qualities, Lewis argues that gestation "needs to be denatured, remade" (7). Against critics of surrogacy who "refuse to see the naturalization already operative in everyday biogenetics" (51), Lewis proposes cyborg (7) and xenofeminist models (128) that "collectively" contribute to developing "prostheses, techniques and technologies that would give us more meaningful forms of agency around pregnancy" (125). The naturalism at work in both antisurrogacy campaigns (36) and the "lie of autonomous value-creation" in...