Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment (Penguin Press, 2005), 91.
Chikako Takeshita, “From Mother/Fetus to Holobiont(s): A Material Feminist Ontology of the Pregnant Body,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3, no. 1 (2017).
Suzanne Sadedin, “Why Pregnancy is a Biological War Between Mother and Baby,” Aeon, August 4, 2014 →.
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (University of California Press, 1993).
Ana Grahovac, “Aliza Shvarts’s Art of Aborting: Queer Conceptions and Resistance to Reproductive Futurism,” MAMSIE 5, no. 2: 1–19.
Erica Millar, Happy Abortions: Our Bodies in the Era of Choice (Zed Books, 2017), 4.
Carolin Schurr, “‘Trafficked’ into a better future? Mexico two years after the surrogacy ban,” HSG Focus magazine, Universität St. Gallen, January 2018.
Associated Press, “Pregnant Cambodian Women Charged with Surrogacy and Human Trafficking,” July 6, 2018.
Sharmila Rudrappa, “How India’s Surrogacy Ban Is Fuelling the Baby Trade in Other Countries,” Quartz, October 24, 2017.
See for instance Michelle Murphy’s succinct overview of Margaret Sanger’s trajectory in Michelle Murphy, “Liberation through Control in the Body Politics of U.S. Radical Feminism,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004).
Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics (University of California Press, 2017), 127.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (Free Press, 1992); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Vintage, 1999).
Irene Lusztig, The Motherhood Archives, Komsomol films, 2013, 91 minutes.
Michelle Stanworth writes: “The term ‘natural’ can hardly be applied to high rates of infertility exacerbated by potentially controllable infections, by occupational hazards and environmental pollutants, by medical and contraceptive mismanagement … (and thus,) the thrust of feminist analysis has been to rescue pregnancy from the status of the natural.” Michelle Stanworth, “The Deconstruction of Motherhood,” in Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, ed. Michelle Stanworth (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 10–35, 34.
The view that reproductive autonomy denatures Nature—be that a good or bad thing—is alive and well. On May 25, 2018, in the wake of the Republic of Ireland’s referendum repealing the ban on abortion in that country, the prominent British philosopher John Milbank (@johnmilbank3) tweeted: “The terrifying number of women in favour of ‘the right to choose’ is evidence of the drastic denaturing of women that lies perhaps at the very heart of the capitalist and bureaucratic drive to depersonalise.” Meanwhile, xenofeminist theorist Helen Hester has aptly criticized the various other bodies of “naturalist” thought—including ecofeminism—that have also relegated gestators to a romanticized state of disempowerment. Writes Hester: “The apparent suggestion that gestation and labour should be beyond one’s control is particularly troubling.” Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Polity Press, 2018), 17.
Firestone’s take on the wave of enthusiasm for Grantly Dick-Read, Lamaze, and related “returns to nature” is worth reproducing, despite the force of its contempt leading her prose into sloppiness: “The cult of natural childbirth itself tells us how far we’ve come from true oneness with nature. Natural childbirth is only one more part of the reactionary hippie Rousseauean Return-to-Nature, and just as self-conscious. Perhaps a mystification of childbirth, true faith, makes it easier for the woman involved. Pseudo-yoga exercises, twenty pregnant women breathing deeply on the floor to the conductor’s baton, may even help some women develop ‘proper’ attitudes (as in ‘I didn’t scream once’).” Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (Verso, 1970/2015), 199.
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia, 2004); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Healers, 2nd ed. (Feminist Press, 2010).
The Doulas: Radical Care for Pregnant People, eds. Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell (Feminist Press, 2016).
Alana Apfel, Birth Work as Care Work: Stories from Activist Birth Communities (PM Press, 2016).
In a study of seventeen “natural birth” manuals, geographer Becky Mansfield found that “natural childbirth requires hard and very conscious work.” Becky Mansfield, “The Social Nature of Natural Childbirth,” Social Science & Medicine 66, no 5 (2008): 1093.
Radical doulas have ideological enemies: so-called ProDoulas. Katie Baker has dug up the dirt on the new clique of cut-throat capitalists in the doula industry. Katie J. M. Baker, “This Controversial Company Wants to Disrupt the Birth World,” BuzzFeed, January 4, 2017 →.
Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Unwin Hyman, 1981).
Katharine Dow, “‘A Nine-Month Head-Start’: The Maternal Bond and Surrogacy,” Ethnos 82, no 1 (2017): 86–104.
“Commercial Surrogacy Has Become a $2bn Industry,” The New Indian Express, September 1, 2016.
Paula Gerber, “Arrests and Uncertainty Overseas Show Why Australia Must Legalise Compensated Surrogacy,” The Conversation, November 23, 2016.
Daniel Politi, “Tens of Thousands Protest in Israel Over Denial of Surrogacy Rights for Gay Men,” Slate, July 22, 2018 →.
Olivia Rudgard, “Surrogacy Reform Could Remove Automatic Rights from Birth Parents,” The Telegraph, May 4, 2018 →.
Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, Health (New York University Press, 2007), 239.
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989), 352.
Marcia Inhorn and Soraya Tremayne, Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives (Berghahn, 2012).
Laura Harrison, Brown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy (New York University Press, 2016).
Elly Teman, Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self (University of California Press, 2010).
Laura Mamo, Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience (Duke University Press, 2007.)
Amrita Banerjee, “Race and a Transnational Reproductive Caste System,” Hypatia 29, no 1 (2013): 113–28.)
Zsusza Berend, The Online World of Surrogacy (Berghahn, 2018).
Amrita Pande, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press, 2014), 21.
Elizabeth Ziff, “‘The Mommy Deployment’: Military Spouses and Surrogacy in the United States,” Sociological Forum 32, no. 2 (2017).
My engagement with “make kin, not babies” can be found in the article “Cthulhu Plays No Role For Me,” Viewpoint magazine, 2017 →. See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016); and the subsequent revision of Haraway’s argument, which continues our ongoing conversation, in Making Kin, Not Population: Reconceiving Generations, eds. Donna Haraway and Adele Clark (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018).
Barbara Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood (Rutgers University Press, 2000), 39.
Mamo, Queering Reproduction, 228.
Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017); Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Duke University Press, 2012); Anglea Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (Minor Compositions, 2012); Shelley Park, “Adoptive Maternal Bodies: A Queer Paradigm For Rethinking Mothering?” Hypatia 21, no 1 (2006): 201–26.
Against Equality: Queer Revolution, not Mere Inclusion, ed. Ryan Conrad (AK Press, 2014).
It is to Michelle O’Brien that everyone should turn for a history of the positive and negative movements of “family abolition” throughout capitalist history: Michelle Esther O’Brien, “To Abolish the Family: Periodizing Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development,” Endnotes 5, forthcoming. Writes O’Brien in her draft manuscript: “Abolishing the family only finds coherence today when joined with the movement against the other dominant means of working-class reproduction: the struggles to abolish the capitalist wage and the racial state … Abolishing the family is the mass decommodification, collectivization and universal access to the material necessities of generational and daily reproduction.”
Mario Biagioli, “Plagiarism, Kinship and Slavery,” Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 2/3 (2014): 84.
This text is an excerpt from the introduction to Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family by Sophie Lewis, published by Verso in May 2019.