In What About Us?, her 1995 polemic on feminism and motherhood, Maureen Freely describes how during the sixties and seventies “you could not call yourself a feminist unless you were prepared to drone on and on about brave new families”:

These ranged from male-free heavens on the lesbian continuum, where sperm never ventured beyond the test tube, to Shulamith Firestone’s limited-contract households that would merge at the right time into a joyous, polymorphously perverse society freed from the incest taboo, to the future suggested by French theorists like Elisabeth Badinter in which the sexes almost merge and social structures mirror their concern with sharing and caring, and lust, once again, is no longer a problem — and men can bear children.

If this sounds like your kind of thing, then you’re in luck. Droning on and on about brave new families — or, better yet, getting rid of families completely — is once again having a moment. 

“It’s time to abolish the family!” declared a Novara media piece from February this year, listing “the likes of Sophie Lewis, Jules Gleeson, Kate Griffiths, Michelle O’Brien and Madeleine Lane-Mckinley” as leading the charge. Next week sees the publication of Lewis’s book Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (follow-up to 2019’s Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and possible forerunner — just a suggestion, Sophie — to 2025’s Families? Fuck ‘em).

Motherhood will be a shared, sex-neutral enterprise

Calls for family abolition combine a very particular sort of wide-eyed utopianism plus condescension towards anyone who expresses misgivings. It is assumed that most people will express misgivings, what with us being dull-witted cogs in the heteropatriarchal machine, incapable of imagining life any other way. 

A glowing New Statesman review of Abolish the Family quotes Lewis being “clear-eyed and witty about the inevitable knee-jerk reaction to calls for family abolition”: “So! The left is trying to take grandma away, now, and confiscate the kids, and this is supposed to be progressive? What the fuck?“ I know, right? What a bunch of reactionary morons we are. 

It’s assumed those of us who are quite attached, if not to our own families, then to the idea of family, do not think very deeply. This is particularly true of mothers, whose tiny bourgeois brains have been cursed to wither and die within the institution. We believe in such nonsense as bonding with our babies and feeling responsible for our children’s welfare, not realising that this is treating them as possessions. Thankfully the abolitionists are here to rescue us from all that. 

There’s no such thing as an exclusive maternal bond in abolished family-topia. As Judy Thorne writes for Novara, “you might give birth yourself one day (whether or not you were born with a uterus). That could be an interesting experience, one that doesn’t come with any expectation of future involvement in childrearing”.

Setting to one side the issue of where these spare uteruses come from — perhaps a designated class of people, similar to the clones in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go — I am intrigued as to how many women would go through pregnancy, birth and the lifelong physical and mental aftermath of childbearing as purely “an interesting experience”. Family abolitionism makes much of valuing labour that has been appropriated by the patriarchal family, but I’m not sure we should count on interest level sufficing here.

For those who want to be actual mothers, motherhood is a shared, sex-neutral enterprise:

Becoming a mother is a two-decade commitment, involving a clear agreement with a group of other mothers (more than three, usually fewer than eight, at least in early years) who will be assigned to the same child. You can leave the mother agreement whenever you want, but neither entering into nor leaving it is something to be taken lightly. These decisions can be left for another day, though — becoming a mother can happen whenever, from early adulthood to old age. For now, you are going to get a massage at the local art nouveau communal bathing pavilion with a friend.

This is similar to what I imagined being a grown-up would be like when I was seven or eight and to be fair, “the local art nouveau communal bathing pavilion” is a good sell. That said, not a decision “to be taken lightly” doesn’t really cut it as an excuse for child abandonment. Stable relationships matter, however uncool words such as “stable” might seem to those on the cutting edge of human relations. 

Any emotional responses or human behaviours which are inconvenient to the family abolitionist vision are ridiculed, whilst “real” love and kinship is promised to those willing to be more “imaginative”. But the bond most mothers feel for their own children is neither unhelpful nor a sign that one has been duped. What Thorne, Lewis and others seem to miss is that whilst “mother love”, in its most cloying, Hallmark card version, has been weaponised to extract labour from women, attempts to sever the genuine bond women have with their own children have long been a feature of patriarchy in its most abusive forms. 

Children are not property, in need of public ownership

That the patriarchal nuclear family treats women and children as private property — that repressive societies have stolen children from poor and marginalised women, denied women custody of their own children upon divorce, and policed female sexuality in order to ensure paternity — does not mean children are property, in need of public as opposed to private ownership. The problem is not the mother-child relationship, but the way men have responded to being excluded from it. Now that women have rights within family relationships, and can construct families which exclude men entirely, new ways must be sought to stigmatise and disrupt these exclusive bonds. Family abolition is backlash politics masquerading as radicalism.

Family abolitionists are correct to state that most abuse takes place within the family home. They are, however, cagey about who is doing the abusing, and why such people would cease to be abusive in a more communal setting. This avoidance is in keeping with a more general sex denialism that runs through the family abolitionist project, eschewing any engagement with a radical feminist analysis of reproductive politics on the basis that this would be “essentialist”. 

There is no answer to how and why male people would cease to be obsessed with controlling female bodies because there is no acknowledgement that this is related to male alienation from the reproductive process. Instead, there is the disempowerment of mothers on the basis that mothers (the boring, bonding kind) are a conservative construct, as opposed to a threat to patriarchy itself.

Ultimately I think family abolition appeals to those on the left who are anti-feminist, pro-porn and pro-commercial surrogacy because mothers are such an enormous inconvenience to them. They pretend we are mindless hausfraus, chained to the Aga, when we are — alongside radical feminists and lesbians — one of the greatest threats to the “progressive” arm of the current backlash against women and children’s rights. 

We are a massive obstacle to anyone proposing to “liberalise” childhood and put the bodies of children up for public ownership because we’re not afraid to declare this dodgy as hell. For all family abolitionists like to pretend that families are centres of isolation, there is nothing they hate more than the communities women form via their identities as mothers. Just look at Mumsnet. 

I can guarantee that, should the family abolitionist utopia ever come into being, there would come a point at which all those who’d donated their uteruses and all those who’d given birth “as an interesting experience” would get together and share their specific experiences and needs. What’s more, no amount of consolation trips to the local art nouveau communal bathing pavilion would prevent these people from organising as a class. Suck it up, nouveau patriarchs. 

That family abolition is a luxury belief — something showcased by the privileged at no great cost to themselves — is demonstrated by the fact that its proponents are not even particularly committed to following its principles. A 2020 interview with Lewis in Vice contained the following gem regarding Lewis’s own marriage to Vicky Osterweil:

She also showed me one of the zines she and Osterweil gave to guests at their wedding, which include speeches from friends and promises to each other. The latter could not properly be called “vows,” because they are in fact disavowals: of the institution of marriage, the biological family, and the dysfunction that both can breed. (They had a more traditional ceremony in Boston, at the request of Osterweil’s mother.)

My own partner and I have never had a wedding, traditional or otherwise, much as my own mother would have liked it. Then again, I don’t know Osterweil’s so I’m not going to judge. The moral of this, in any case, is that you don’t mess with mums. Try to abolish us at your peril.