You can't choose your family. But despite this, most of us wouldn’t choose to be without them either. For the lucky, families are a place of love, care and safety. But for many, the family creates everlasting trauma in a life. Even in so-called ‘happy familles’, the unpaid labour and childcare are exhausting. Leading feminist critic, Sophie Lewis, argues the family should be abolished.

The social scientific consensus that the overdeveloped world is in the grip of a ‘care crisis’ is at least fifteen years old: life expectancies are going down, we all work ourselves sick, no one can comfortably afford adequate housing, and our governments have decimated social services such as shelters, eldercare, disability care, psychotherapy, and support for queer youth. By cloistering huge numbers of people within the domestic sphere, the COVID-19 pandemic shone a light on the longstanding strain affecting local webs of mutual aid (and unpaid kin-based care) as well as fragile global chains of commodified care. While Covid exacerbated them, the so-called ‘shadow pandemics’ of elder abuse, domestic battery, isolation, community depletion, familial sexual violence, mental ill-health, and a phenomenon UNICEF calls child ‘regression,’ were clearly preexisting. Op-eds came thick and fast wondering if ‘the nuclear family was a mistake.’