In contemporary societies, children have become important “nodes'' of desire. Practices like adoption and foster care, supposedly designed to serve the ‘best interests of children’, have already for decades been used to fulfill the reproductive wishes of infertile heterosexual couples. In more recent times, an increasingly diverse group of prospective parents – now also composed of singles and LGBTQI+ couples – are additionally relying on assisted reproductive technologies (ART) – such as in vitro fertilisation, (trans)national gamete donation and surrogacy – which are complementing and even replacing those already existing practices of family formation. 

However, both these older and newer practices of (assisted) family formation are increasingly contested by different scholars, policy makers, practitioners, and activists across the political and analytical spectrum. Such criticisms involve the global (neo)colonial inequalities of power in which reproductive tissues (oocytes, sperm), labours (gestation, ovulation, mothering) and children “flow” from the Global South and East to mostly White middle-class families in the Global North (Inhorn, 2015; Twine, 2015). Feminists are particularly concerned with the potential exploitation and commodification of the bodies, labours and biologies of the women involved, including surrogates, egg cell providers and first mothers. From the perspective of children’s rights, their objectification and the upholding of secrecy and anonymity in adoption and ART policies and practices is increasingly viewed as a violation of their right to identity and information about their biogenetic origins. These discussions play out in a context where conservative and/or far right pro-family groups present newer reproductive technologies and non-traditional family formations as an existential threat to the so-called ‘natural’ heteronormative family order.  

These diverging moral and socio-political concerns across countries are resulting in policy and civil society campaigns for the prohibition or abolition of family-making practices, including the abolition of (commercial) surrogacy, intercountry adoption and queer and feminist demands to abolish the (nuclear) family (Lewis, 2022; O’Brien, 2023; Weeks, 2023). While such calls for abolition all emerge from a shared concern with the (re)production of inequalities within reproductive practices, they also expose some tensions within feminist, queer, decolonial, critical race and STS theorizing on practices of family formation. Abolition emerged in the 19th century as a civil rights movement against slavery in the colonial plantation economies and is currently being repurposed in contemporary scholarship and activism on the abolition of prisons and police (Gillmore, 2022; Davis, 2024). During this two-day workshop on the various reproductive horizons of “abolition”, we want to explore the potential of abolitionist frameworks in re-imagining reproductive frameworks that can contest and transcend the coloniality of power inherent in past, current and future family formation practices.  

US-based legal scholar Dorothy Roberts (2022), for example, theorized how the current child welfare system functions as a system of “family policing” that is part of the same “carceral regime” as the police and prison systems and involves the invasive surveillance of Black and marginalized families and the forced separation of such families through foster care and adoption. Her abolitionist approach implies not merely ‘reforming’ this system but radically ending family policing “by dismantling the current system and re-imagining the very meaning of child welfare and safety” (p. 455). In some radical feminist circles (from FINRRAGE to CIAMS), abolitionist frameworks have been seized upon to radically condemn any use of reproductive technologies, unequivocally equating all forms of “reproductive engineering” to enslavement, human trafficking and oppression of women and their bodies. However, techno-feminists like Sophie Lewis (2017, p. 103) argue that such radical rejections of technology also foreclose alternative visions of kinship that such technologies can enable and deny how these might also be actively redesigned by feminist agents. In her recent work, Lewis (2022) uses the heuristic of abolition to creatively rethink ways of caring, mothering and parenting that go beyond the boundaries of the capitalist and patriarchal nuclear family. Such an abolitionism would not necessarily exclude the use of technologies in its efforts to enable alternative forms of care, while simultaneously ending the exploitation of marginalized, racialized and queer communities.   

To discuss these issues, we are organizing a 2-day workshop which is expected to take place on 27 and 28 March 2025 at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and funded by the UvA’s Decolonial Futures Network. This gathering will combine keynote lectures by renowned repro-scholars Professor Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian and Prof. Alan Detlaff with in-depth panel discussions. We invite contributions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to engage with the following questions: 

• What are the colonial and de/anticolonial relations between older and newer forms and practices of reproduction and family formation? 

• How and to what extent can ‘abolition’ be used in the reproductive realm as an  anti/decolonial tool of analysis and practice to establish more just and emancipatory practices/technologies of family formation?  

• How do notions like ‘family policing’ and ‘abolition’ apply in a context outside the US? To what extent would they resemble or differ from the US-context in which they were originally designed, but where the impacts of slavery, racialised oppression and punitive regimes derive from different historical trajectories? 

• How can reproductive technologies be used in imaginative and agentic ways to enable alternative configurations of care, social reproduction and kinning that not only cater to the desires of prospective parents, but also recenter the agency and needs of the children and reproductive workers involved in these arrangements? 

• What can be learned from different abolitionist projects within feminist, anti-racist and anti/decolonial analytical and political traditions? 

Send in an abstract of max. 250 words to reproductiveabolitions@gmail.com by 15 September 2024 at the latest. Selected participants will be asked to prepare a short paper (2500-3000) to be circulated ahead of the workshop. This event is organized by Siggie Vertommen (Universiteit van Amsterdam and Universiteit Gent), Sophie Withaeckx (Universiteit Maastricht) and Atamhi Cawayu (Universidad Católica Boliviana).