With Our Bodies, Whose Property? Anne Phillips offers a timely and in-depth analysis of recent debates surrounding social policies and the legal frameworks governing rape and sex work, medically assisted reproduction, and human organ “donation.” All three policy areas have experienced widespread public attention in recent years as controversies about definitions of rape and sex work, the rights and wrongs of “designer babies” and surrogate motherhood, as well as the commodification of human organ donations have come under scrutiny. In recent decades, lawmakers around the world have grappled with the ethical, social, and political implications of what we can or cannot do with our and other people's bodies.

In this study Phillips explains how property rights discourses have contributed in important ways to definitions of rape as well as the development of markets for sex work and prostitution, third-party reproduction (including egg and embryo donations and surrogate motherhood) and organ transfer (such as kidney and skin transplants), where patients and clients meet as buyers and sellers of human body parts and services. Phillips' clear and detailed analysis of the property rights discourses that have driven much of these developments in the UK and beyond offers insight into how analytical concepts used in political discourses (such as the concept of property rights) matter for framing as well as for outcomes of social policies.

Specifically, Phillips posits that framing these issues in terms of property rights over one's body where one individual's “right” competes with another individual's “makes it harder for societies to address society-level effects, and casts a pall of suspicion over objectives like ‘promoting solidarity,’ ‘maintaining reciprocity,’ or ‘encouraging altruistic practices’” in the areas of sex work, assisted reproduction, and organ procurement (143). Phillips claims that this type of political argument has contributed to unequal gender hierarchies that adversely affect women's social status. She cites the developing market for contractual surrogate motherhood as an example of this process. By targeting only women's bodies, it essentializes their identity as mothers based on their reproductive capacity. Importantly, throughout the book, Phillips logically dissects these property discourses connected to rape, prostitution, assisted reproduction, and human organ procurement to explain to the reader how contingent political discourses are constructed analytically and how they have real effects on citizens through individual countries' policy machineries.

Phillips begins her study with two interconnected questions that drive the structure of the book. In the introduction, she asks, “What, if anything, is wrong with thinking of oneself as the owner of one's body? What, if anything, is wrong with making our bodies available for rent or sale?” (2). In some ways, this is a reformulation of recent work by Michael Sandel (Reference Sandel2012) and Debra Satz (Reference Satz2010) with which Phillips engages in her analysis. The first chapter, “What's So Special about the Body?” explores the issue of what sets policy considerations regarding the human body apart from regulating other “social resources” (30). The next three chapters explore how property rights discourses have contributed to the commodification of human bodies and body parts in three policy arenas: rape and sex work, medically assisted reproduction, and human organ procurement. Importantly, in the first chapter Phillips explains how feminist theory has provided arguments for both sides of the analytical divide for and against bodily property rights. She clarifies how some theorists see property discourses as contributing to the objectification of women and their bodies and others see them as empowering women to do with their bodies as they see fit, including selling or renting their bodies and bodily services. This latter stance has resurfaced in “new commodification theories,” which Phillip discusses in greater detail in Chapters 3 and 4.

In Chapter 2, entitled “Property Models of Rape,” Phillips examines how women's rape used to be considered a crime against men's property and not a crime against the woman who was raped. She shows how today's legal approaches that define rape as sex that is lacking a woman's consent operate under a similar dynamic as the property-based model. These approaches separate women's subjectivity from their bodily experiences of the crime based on the legal test of whether the act was consensual or not. Similarly, Phillips argues in Chapter 3, “Bodies for Rent? The Case of Commercial Surrogacy,” that under commercial surrogacy schemes, women are increasingly alienated from the bodily experiences of being pregnant and giving birth to a child because such experiences stand in the way of a brokered market exchange. Alienation from pregnancy and birthing is encouraged in order to prevent surrogates from renouncing their contractual agreement to hand over the baby to its intended parents. In Chapter 4, “Spare Parts and Desperate Need,” Phillips turns to the market for human kidneys. She argues that payment for human organ procurement contributes to the sense that body and mind are separate entities within a person and promotes the view that our bodies are marketable resources that can change ownership, rather than “belonging to nobody” (135).

In the concluding chapter, “The Individualism of Property Claims,” Phillips discusses the policy implications of rights discourses and warns against individualistic solutions to social issues, particularly since new medical and scientific discoveries will “continue to multiply” (155). In her view, individualistic rights discourses come at significant social costs, most notably by producing rising inequalities. One of the many strengths of Phillips books is that it offers the reader a comprehensive analytical overview of past and present political arguments involved in the many debates surrounding the commodifications of our bodies. The book is a crucial contribution to future debates in these policy arenas, as it calls for greater attention to the common good over individual interests.