However, both these older and newer reproductive technologies are also 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), labors (gestation, ovulation, mothering) and children ‘flow’ from the Global South and East to White middle-class families in the Global North.  

These moral and socio-political concerns 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.  

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 and progressive theorizing on practices of family formation.  

This project aims to create an interdisciplinary dialogue on whether ‘abolition’ can be used as a decolonial tool to analyze reproductive injustice in contemporary practices of family formation, aiming to promote fair and emancipatory reproductive practices and technologies. This will be done by organizing an international workshop with keynote lectures by Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian and Alan Detlaff, a network day, and a podcast series with key scholars and organizers in the field.  

Siggie Vertommen works as a researcher and lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Ghent University. Her research grapples with the social study of (assisted) reproduction from various feminist and anticolonial perspectives. She uses reproductive technologies, including transnational surrogacy, egg donation, and adoption as a lens to make sense of broader socio-political realities in Israel/Palestine, Georgia and Belgium.  

Atamhi Cawayu is a social scientist based in Bolivia, currently working at the Research Institute for Behavioral Sciences at the Universidad Católica Boliviana “San Pablo” in La Paz. In 2023, he earned a PhD in Gender and Diversity Studies from Ghent University. His doctoral thesis, “Searching for Restoration: An Ethnographic Study of Transnational Adoption from Bolivia,” critically examines the adoption and child protection system in Bolivia, with a particular focus on families of origin. Cawayu’s expertise centers on childhood and child protection, with specific interests in transnational adoption, care-leavers, and sexual violence against children. 

Sophie Withaeckx is assistant professor in philosophy at Maastricht University. Previously, she was a coordinator and post-doc researcher at RHEA (Centre of Expertise on Gender, Diversity and Intersectionality at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and as lecturer and researcher at Odisee University College. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and Ethics (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).  Her PhD research (2014) studied honour-based violence and understandings of culture, gender and morality in experiences with violence. Her current research focuses on how normative understandings of ‘humanity’ shape public spaces and institutions. In this regard, she examines how diversity and ‘decolonization’ have become managed in higher education, but also how the practice of transnational adoption has become shaped according to taken-for-granted notions of humanity, family and kinship.