The Sentinel Evening Post: Make Kin, Not Babies: Expanding Our Definition of Family

In 2016, the philosopher Donna Haraway gave the world a controversial slogan that made a lot of people uncomfortable, and it made some people furious. She said: "Make kin, not babies." In her book Staying with the Trouble, Haraway asks why it is that we treat biological reproduction as the default definition of family.

We have inherited this idea that a real family has to do with genes, offspring, and bloodline. Everything else is fragile. Everyone else will come and go. But Haraway argues that this is both historically strange and ecologically dangerous. It is strange because for most of human history, kinship was far wider than biology. You belonged to a village, a clan, a web of mutual obligation that included people that we were not even related to.

And it is ecologically dangerous because any economic system that depends upon endless population growth will, as she puts it, "run out of planet." Haraway is not anti-natalist. She is pro-child, but in a different way. She thinks we should view babies as rare and precious, and invest massively in those that we have, whether they are yours or not.

But she also thinks we need to expand our definition of kinship to include adopted children, chosen family, and what she calls 'oddkin' (relationships of care that cross the boundaries of blood, race, species, and even biology itself).

Many people know that sometimes the most important and powerful relationships in life are those that we are not born into. They are the ones that take time and involve great effort. Haraway isn't telling us to abandon any family. She is saying: "Why are we making our family so small?"