It argues that capital pushes us to see genetic babies as private property—we personalize and thereby commodify all babies (116)—and that this undermines a more communal approach to organizing society.

Can we explicitly ask hitherto middle-class white persons with wombs to take on their fair share of gestation, if their contribution is decently rewarded and it is socially valuable? Rather, Lewis proposes a surrogacy that is “beyond recognition” (33) where we all partake in social reproduction in multiple roles, rather than private reproduction with the sole role of the gestator. Surrogates should be put front and center, and their rights to the babies they gestate should be expanded to acknowledge that they are more than mere vessels. The Farm” is an ensemble book, told from the perspective of four different characters, but its hero is Jane, a Filipina-American woman in her early twenties, who turns to Golden Oaks after she’s fired from her baby-nurse job and can find no better way to support her infant daughter.According to Lewis, the surrogates usually deliver via C-section when they are thirty-six weeks pregnant, “shaving five weeks or so off production time, delivering the baby just-in-time for collection. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. Surrogates are already challenging how families are created and give us a glimpse at an alternative future: “a premonition of genuine mutuality” (167) if done well. The visceral stew of queer feminist communist political theory and the biotechnological birthing discussion are sometimes difficult to read. Lewis takes one of the most everyday things about being human and thinks it through from the point of view of a cyborg communism.

There is an extended discussion of the Akanksha Clinic in Anand, Gujarat, India, and its charismatic head doctor, Dr.

One character in “The Farm,” Ate, tirelessly works as a cook, a maid, and a baby nurse to support her disabled adult son in the Philippines, whom she hasn’t seen for more than twenty years.