Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change. Drawing on surveys on Americans' changing behavior over the past twenty-five years, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether the PTA, church, recreation clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. Our shrinking access to the "social capital" that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing is a serious threat to our civic and personal health. The loss of social capital is felt in critical ways : communities with less social capital have lower educational performance and more teen pregnancy, child suicide, low birth weight, and prenatal mortality. Social capital is also a strong predictor of crime rates, other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and health. America has faced this crisis before. At the turn of the last century, social capital was at low ebb, reduced by urbanization, industrialization, and vast immigration that uprooted Americans from their friends, social institutions, and families. Faced with this challenge, the country righted itself. Within a few decades, a range of organizations was created, from the Red Cross, Boy Scouts, and YWCA to Hadassah and the Knights of Columbus and the Urban League and social capital was rebuilt. Putnam calls on Americans to start the process again.

"Giving birth is commonly called labor. What happens if all of human pregnancy and gestation is thought from the labor point of view? If it is all labor, then how can that labor be freed from now global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation? That's the challenge of Full Surrogacy Now. The new lens on labor it gives us opens up crucial challenges and questions: What are the connections between the bodily labor of gestating and other forms of biological, social, and ecological production and reproduction? How can we politicize (human and nonhuman) work that's treated as natural, taken for granted, and done for free? Why is the impossible concept of "surrogacy" crucial to our collective liberation? And what might organizing based on solidarity between the "shopfloors" of paid and unpaid babymaking have to do with the often forgotten liberation horizon of family abolition?" --