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Sophie Anne Lewis (born 1988 or 1989)[1] is a German-British academic and author, known for her radical ideas of family abolition and the use of surrogacy on a societal scale. Lewis has published two books through Verso Books; Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family, published in 2019, and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, published in October 2022.
Born in Vienna,[1] Lewis studied at the University of Oxford, achieving a Bachelor of Arts in English and a master's degree in environmental policy. She completed a master's in politics at The New School in New York City and a PhD at the University of Manchester. Lewis' PhD thesis, entitled Cyborg Labour: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Work, focused on the political economy of the surrogacy industry.[2] After completing her PhD, Lewis published her first book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family, which was followed by Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation in October 2022.
Lewis is based in Philadelphia; she is a visiting scholar at the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies (FQT Center) at the University of Pennsylvania,[3] and teaches at the Philadelphia branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.[4] Having largely departed from academia, Lewis makes a living as a freelance writer supported by speaking gigs and her Patreon members.[5]
In Full Surrogacy Now, Lewis argues that all gestation is work because of the labour it demands from pregnant women, often referring to pregnancy as an "extreme sport".[1] Lewis advocates for a future in which people do not live in the private nuclear households we know today but care for one another in larger systems. Jessica Weinberg in The New Yorker argued that the book failed to account for that "mysterious variety of love" only biological motherhood can offer.[1] Nivedita Majumdar in the Jacobin condemned Lewis’s "dogmatic hostility to the parent-child relation".[1][6]
In her review of Abolish the Family, Antonella Gambotto-Burke called the book a "rightful heir" to Shulamith Firestone's 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, a book of "flagrant idiocy" in Gambotto-Burke's opinion. She describes Lewis' proposal as an Utopia where women are "relieved of the burden of their own inadequacies" and suggests that Lewis fails to grasp that factors other than the structural character of the family may result in the "extreme unhappiness" of families that Lewis claims.[7] The book has been translated into German.[8]
