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Today, surrogacy is legal in most U.S states. However, in places where, until recently, surrogacy was not legal, the issue became an LGBTQ+ rallying cry. Take, for instance, New York’s “Love Makes a Family” campaign, a pro-surrogacy campaign that centered discourses of LGBTQ+ equality and images of gay men in its promotional materials. Beyond this, an entire industry supports gay men looking to reproduce via surrogates. One of these organizations, Men Having Babies, sees their work as a matter of “fertility equality,” as enabling the expansion of “equality to its final and logical conclusion.” The language of love, family, and equality are central to these LGBTQ+ surrogacy campaigns, which frame surrogacy as an important right for LGBTQ+ people. However, reading these campaigns through a Queer Studies lens suggests that we should think about them otherwise. If we understand “queer” as a term that refers to ways of being that challenge social norms, rather than an umbrella term for LGBTQ+ identities, surrogacy is not actually queer. It is a site for the expansion of the biological nuclear family. Surrogacy rests on the heteronormative assumption that nuclear, biologically-related families with married parents are preferable to other relationship and social formations—desires that are heteronormative even when expressed by LGBTQ+ intended parents. There are queerer ways of loving. 

QUEER WAYS OF LOVING
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