Last Updated on February 21, 2020
As certain political agendas become more out-in-the-open; one particular agenda has been perfectly distilled in the headline published earlier today by Vice Magazine.
The article, titled “We Can’t Have a Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family,” brings to the fore what ostensibly is at the crux of the feminist ideology: the total dissolution of the nuclear family.
Over the past 60 years or so, the nuclear family appears to be on its last legs–enduring an onslaught of policies, programs, and social revolutions seeking to undermine its structure, all under the glamorous banner of progress.
However, if anything, the consequences of pulling men, women, and children apart; then, pitting them against each other, has proven nothing short of destructive on a colossal scale.
Myriad problems have ensued – notwithstanding what may spell the wholesale collapse of Western society – since the family structure began crumbling.
Social programs, the state, have filled the role of a fatherly provider. Recent times have brought inauthenticity in the form of surrogacy. The state is a surrogate of the father; tearful young immigrants are surrogates of children; consumerism is the surrogate of purpose; and branded goods, a surrogate for identity.
In the article, radical Feminist thinker, Sophie Lewis, proposes what Vice deems to be a “radical proposal.”
Her book, Full Surrogacy Now, delves into the possibility–and something which isn’t exactly a novel proposal–of society, not the family, raising kids without bloodlines dictating proceedings.
According to the article:
When Lewis demands “full surrogacy now,” she isn’t talking about commercial surrogacy, or ”Surrogacy™,” as she puts it. Instead, she uses the surrogacy industry to build the argument that all gestation is work because of the immense physical and emotional labor it requires of those who do it. She often refers to pregnancy as an “extreme sport.”
If all forms of pregnancy count as work, we can take a clear-eyed look at our current working conditions: “It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us,” she says at the start of her book, citing the roughly 1,000 people in the United States who still die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth each year—mostly poor women and women of color. “This situation is social, not simply ‘natural.’ Things are like this for political and economic reasons: we made them this way.”
Moreover, the nuclear family allegedly exploits people of color and leads to the disowning of queer children.
The article continues:
At this point, “surrogacy” becomes somewhat metaphorical: Lewis isn’t asking that we all agree to physically gestate fetuses that aren’t biologically ours. Her radical proposition is that we practice “full surrogacy” by abolishing the family. That means caring for each other not in discrete private units (also known as nuclear households), but rather within larger systems of care that can provide us with the love and support we can’t always get from blood relations—something Lewis knows all too well.
The article takes a deeper personal turn in revealing Lewis’ being raped at the age of 13, something which her father reportedly took little notice of.
Overall, the article brazenly admits, despite its Utopian theme, what in practice is the logical conclusion of her brand of feminism: the dissolution of the nuclear family and atomization of Western society.
