Footnote 1 For the reproductive commune, such intimate ties to multiple particular persons may exist, but they may not, and it is quite a jump to have faith it will simply work out for the children. In Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family , Sophie Lewis offers a new radical engagement with surrogacy, highlighting the systematic inconsistences in prevailing understandings of the family and birthing and advocating for a communal approach to reproductive labour that enables the proliferation of relationships of care. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. In all cases, workers can make their labor visible, and they can unionize, strike, and demand better pay and working conditions from employers, and they can form collectives in alternative work arrangements (73, 75, 77, 80). Lewis could evade this concern by assuming that all future communes worth discussing will be places with such intimate ties simpliciter.

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.

Read it and let’s imagine different constellations of care, love and family beyond the conservative restraint of supposed biology. However, surrogacy being work is a means to “maximally eradicate work” (125), not an end in itself: we need to see work where it is (not necessarily increase or enjoy it) before we can get to abolishing capital. Going by the ethos of the book, these are for all of us to address, if we think the vision is worth pursuing.

What especially frustrates Lewis is that, despite the obvious sacrifices of pregnancy and of being away from family, the Akanksha clinicians and clients are still skittish about referring to surrogacy as “work.For Lewis, those “othered” in mainstream society—those who are not heteronormative, white, cisgendered, citizens, propertied, and so on—illustrate ways to do family differently and (presumably) better. How do we seriously proliferate relations when some families can elect to cling to the nuclear private version? These suggestions, in part, target a concern that the family is a mechanism for sustaining capitalism and wealth inequality (Engels Reference Engels1884). 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?