Kindred spirits?

In this commentary, I reflect on the connections and strains between various efforts to expand options for family-making, to reduce the inequities that structure family-making through assisted reproduction and adoption, to secure and protect reproductive rights, and to pursue reproductive justice. I suggest that two threads connect these various aspects of reproductive politics: the commitment to self-determination, and an expanded understanding of kinship beyond the nuclear and the biological. These two themes stand in complicated tension – visible in debates over the ethics of surrogacy, for instance, and in the ways that queer family-making is facilitated, in part, by class and racial inequalities – that need to be confronted head-on. I conclude with some examples of what political kinship built around family justice can and does look like at the level of concrete action.