Full Surrogacy Now

Book Review

Henry_

Sophie Lewis, Full surrogacy now, Feminism against the family, Verso, London, 2019

In a recent Saturday feature, the Guardian interviewed a man with an AI girlfriend. He said, ‘We want to have children in real life’. The interviewee says he plans to adopt, but it could well be a case for surrogacy.
At present there is no technological alternative to a living womb inside a living human for gestating a foetus. Surrogacy means a human being will provide and subordinate the services of their own healthy, functioning womb to the desire of someone else, the would-be parent or parents.
Whatever your relationship to reproduction – not everyone has a functioning womb, not everyone is a birthing mother – Lewis’ discussion of surrogacy is an important guide to some key feminist questions. This book is strength training for good reading and a preparation for the true, grown up, mamahood in which we are called to look after all children. The author encourages us to read and think surrogacy as if we are against it, to discover what it might look like now. Lewis writes ,‘Read surrogacy against the grain and thereby begin to reclaim the productive web of queer care (real surrogacy) that Surrogacy TM is privately channelling, monetising and basically stealing from us.’
As a womb owner, albeit defunct, and at least four times gestator, most of the technical, biological aspects of this investigation into surrogacy are so far away from my own and probably most people’s experience of pregnancy, birth and childcare. Barely 0.4% of IVF treatments in UK licensed clinics involve a surrogate, about 400 a year in 2023. Full surrogacy and queer care are unfamiliar concepts still. The nuclear family is considered a corner stone of capitalism, government policy is biased towards ‘family values’ whatever that means on the ground. Right wing activists take the discourse further with talk of protecting and providing for ‘our own’.
Lewis reminds us how dangerous childbearing is for humans, compared with non-humans. We wonder, with Lewis, why anyone would want to put themselves through such an exhausting, death-defying experience. ‘With any luck mother and baby make it out alive,’ she writes, quoting Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts. During gestation, we learn, the womb owner’s body works hard not to be obliterated. The biological changes a body undergoes during pregnancy can be compared to cancer. And yet, socially, the pregnant person is expected to make very hard work look like nothing at all, working other jobs and living a normal, active life right up to the last week of gestation. In addition, it is as if the mother disappears from the story. A National Geographic film depicts the foetus as a brave little soldier battling his way out of the womb and into life. The Virgin Mary is invisible surrogate and Hagar, mother of Ishmael, gets chased into the desert.
Possessive pronouns [my, mine and my own] are challenging and challenged in true, full surrogacy, Lewis tells us. This doesn’t seem so far from my own experience. In some ways we are all surrogates. Many first time mothers, when they have given birth, realise they are no longer ‘more than one and less than two’. There are now two perfectly distinct people in the room. A home birth is a further opportunity for magical thinking: someone has arrived, but not through the front door. Academics, we learn, quote Khalil Gibran, ‘Your children are not your children’ with caution. And in a discussion on black sisterhood, Jeffner Allen, ‘In breaking free from motherhood..I no longer give primacy to that which I have produced.’
In the chapter ‘The world’s (other) oldest profession’ Lewis looks at surrogacy from a Marxist feminist point of view, ‘Noncommercial surrogacy is a capitalist hinterland. Commercial surrogacy is capitalist industry’.
A human baby should be ‘priceless’ and ‘nonfungible’ according to Dr Patel, director of the Akanksha Infertility Clinic, Anand, India. On TEDx and Oprah Winfrey, she presents her business model in altruistic terms. She provides babies for childless couples while improving the lives of surrogates who otherwise ‘would be working as maids’. The multi million dollar business, from which Dr. Patel says she takes ‘not a penny’, pays for a new hospital, state of the art equipment, the latest in maternity care. In the guise of social empowerment, surrogates are offered literacy and sewing skills. However surrogates are also forced to accept meagre pay, which is further reduced by expenses and middlemen and give up control of their own pregnancy, forced to deliver by Caesarean section at thirty six to thirty eight weeks. For context, in India as a whole, only 17% of women receive any kind of medical care and commercial surrogacy is now illegal.
Lewis’ discussion of surrogacy, leads us to consider social reproduction in general. In a reminder of Wages for Housework, women are expected to do the work of gestation without complaint, out of love, often at the same time as other jobs. To sustain a growth economy the UK depends on population growth, even though in the current atmosphere of casual racism and classism, not everyone is considered a suitable candidate for producing children.
The question asked by many voices in this book: Is gestation work? If a surrogate goes on strike, what would a strike look like? With this investigation, we are asked to consider work in general, in particular all types of alienated labour that depend on a body, like delivery riders, call centre workers, cleaners, labourers.
Through the last chapter, Amniotechnics, we are called to greater awareness of our own ‘cyborg’ natures, to nurture ‘oddkin’ not ‘biokin’ in Donna Haraway’s words, for greater deeper interconnection with our watery planet and each other. Full Surrogacy Now is a call to real surrogacy, surrogacy for surrogates, where all children are loved and cared for.‌

Henry_ is a poet, writer, teacher and peace activist.