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Reproductive justice and gestational surrogacy are often implicitly treated as antonyms. Yet the former represents a theoretic approach that enables the long and racialised history of surrogacy (far from a new or 'exceptional' practice) to be appreciated as part of a struggle for 'radical kinship' and gender-inclusive polymaternalism. Recasting surrogacy as a dynamic contradiction in itself, full of latent possibilities relevant to early Reproductive Justice militants' familyabolitionist aims, this article invites scholars in human geography and cognate disciplines to rethink the boundaries of surrogacy politics. As ethnographies of formal gestational workplaces, accounts of gestational workers' self-organised resistance, and readings of the attendant public media scandals show (taking examples from India, Thailand, and New Jersey), there is no good reason to place these new economies of 'third-party reproductive assistance' in a 'realm apart' from conversations about social reproduction more generally. Surrogacy, I argue, potentially names a practice of commoning at the same time as it names a new wave of accumulation in which clinicians are capitalising on the contemporary-biogenetic-propertarian, white-supremacist-logic of kinmaking in the Global North. Ongoing experiments in the redistribution of mothering labour ('othermothering' in the Black feminist tradition) suggest that 'another surrogacy is possible' , animated by what Kathi Weeks and the 1970s intervention 'Wages Against Housework' conceive as antiwork politics. In making this argument, the article revives the concept 'gestational labour' as a means of keeping the process of 'literal' reproduction open to transformation. Radical kinship In Against Love: A Polemic, Laura Kipnis (2003) wrote in passing: 'Clearly the answer to the much-debated question 'Does divorce harm children?' should be "Compared to what?"' (141). This, I believe, is the right kind of question to ask about commercial gestational surrogacy. News headlines typically imply that surrogacy inflicts a great

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Most geographers have sided with ‘cyborgs’ (technonatural subjects) against ‘goddesses’ (e.g. Mother Earth) on questions of embodiment. In itself this provides no justification for the relative dearth (in geography) of theorizing ‘with’ the uterus as a site of doing and undoing; what I propose to call uterine geography. ‘Uterine’ relations are fundamentally cyborg, animatedly labouring and not only spatial but spatializing: they make and unmake places, borders, kin. This includes not only abortion, miscarriage, menstruation and pregnancy (whose transcorporeal and chimeric character is well documented in medical anthropology) but also other life-enabling forms of holding and letting go that do not involve anatomical uteri (such as trans-mothering and other alter-familial practices). Despite our discipline’s ostensible interest in co-production, hybridity and the more-than-human, the ‘doing’ aspects of intra and interuterine processes have tended to be black-boxed in accounts of care economies and social reproduction. The proposed remedy is deromanticization: an approach that critically politicizes uterine relations as historically contingent and subject to amelioration through struggle. Potential aides include Maggie Nelson’s idea that ‘labor does you’, Suzanne Sadedin’s account of gestation’s mutual hostility and the concepts of ‘sym-poiesis’ and ‘metramorphosis’. One notable consequence of this expanded concept of the uterine is that ‘assisted reproduction’, as it is characterized today, ceases to be categorically separate from other kinds of reproduction.

When was the last time a major UK city's theatre-going population spent four days being educated, entertained and spiritually moved by-almost exclusively-women of colour? The playwrights commissioned for the Royal Exchange's festival around birth inequalities were Swati Simha (dramatising maternal mortality, scapegoating and sterilisation in rural India), Xu Nuo (the gendered continuities straddling the end of 'one-child' policy in China), Marcia Zanelatto (the suppression of indigenous knowledges and rise of cesarean sections in Brazil), Stacey Gregg (patriarchy in Northern Ireland), Mũmbi Kaigwa (breaking silence around fistula in Kenya), Kirsten Greenidge (obstetric over-medicalisation in US history) and Liwaa Yazji (reproductive and sexual violence in war-torn Syria). Those who performed the seven scripts, under the direction of Emma Callander (Theatre Uncut) and Natalie Diddams, are among the most talented I've seen: