In order to become ethically acceptable, surrogacy must change beyond recognition - but we need more surrogacy, not less!

The surrogacy industry is worth an estimated 1 billion dollars a year, and many of its surrogates work in terrible conditions, while many gestate babies for no pay at all. Should it be illegal to pay someone to gestate a baby for you?

Full Surrogacy Now brings a fresh and unique perspective to the debate. Rather than making surrogacy illegal or allowing it to continue as is, Sophie Lewis argues, we should be looking to radically transform it. Surrogates should be put front and centre, and their rights towards the babies they gestate should be expanded to acknowledge that they are more than mere vessels. In doing so, we can break down our assumptions that children necessarily belong to those whose genetics they share.

This might sound like a radical proposal, she admits, but expanding our idea of who children belong to would be a good thing. Taking collective responsibility for children, rather than only caring for the ones we share DNA with, would radically transform notions of kinship. Adopting this expanded concept of surrogacy, helps us to see that it always, as the saying goes, takes a village to raise a child.

"Pregnancy. Babies. Families. Nature itself. Like capitalism, communism knows no bounds. Relentless in the task of seizing of the means of reproduction, Sophie Lewis is the Right's worst nightmare." - George Ciccariello-Maher, author of Building the Commune

"Full Surrogacy Now makes a significant contribution to the pressing political project of advocating for the rights of those workers whose labour is so often delegitimised, exploited and criminalised... join[ing] such texts as Juno Mac and Molly Smith's Revolting Prostitutesin combating the white, liberal, trans-exclusionary, whorephobic, 'feminist' discourse which is currently dominating conversations around sex work and gestational labour." - Vector

"Lewis is attempting to do for pregnancy what the Wages for Housework movement did in reconceptualizing the unpaid labor done by women in the home as work. And recognizing surrogacy as work and surrogates as workers is a necessary first step, for if surrogacy is work, then isn't, by extension, every pregnancy?" - Jezebel

"The radical openness of these dreams is alluring ... [Full Surrogacy Now]leaves one with the beautiful, liquid possibility of a world that recognizes "our inextricably surrogated contamination with and by everybody else"." - Times Literary Supplement

"A thrilling new intervention ... 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." - New Humanist

"Theoretical, devious, a mix of manifesto and memoir." - The New Yorker

"Incisive and exciting...a must-read for those interested in queer feminist engagements with family, reproductive labour and global class relations." - LSE Review of Books

"For a business that deals in common ingredients and a mature technology, surrogacy is curiously expensive... Nevertheless, the price tag remains high, as do the hoops to jump through, adding to already compelling human drama. Full Surrogacy Now is a prosurrogacy tract that finds plenty to fault in the current situation." - Population and Development Review, Vol 46, No 3