Birthing a Mother The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self [Paperback]

Birthing a Motheris the first ethnography to probe the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. In this beautifully written and insightful book, Elly Teman shows how surrogates and intended mothers carefully negotiate their cooperative endeavor. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork among Jewish Israeli women, interspersed with cross-cultural perspectives of surrogacy in the global context, Teman traces the processes by which surrogates relinquish any maternal claim to the baby even as intended mothers accomplish a complicated transition to motherhood. Temans groundbreaking analysis reveals that as surrogates psychologically and emotionally disengage from the fetus they carry, they develop a profound and lasting bond with the intended mother.

Elly Temanis a Research Fellow at the Penn Center for the Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Birthing a Motheris brilliant and beautifully written. It showcases Temans great skills as an ethnographer and her sophisticated analytic mind. She portrays all her subjects with empathy and compassion, whether surrogates, intended parents, or professionals otherwise involved in the reproductive procedures she documents.Charis Thompson, author ofMaking Parents

Teman deftly portrays surrogacy as a joint project through which one woman assists another, through sacrifice and instruction, to become also a mother.Heather Paxson, author ofMaking Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Yael
Introduction

Part One: Dividing
1. Surrogate Selves and Embodied Others
2. The Body Map
3. Operationalizing the Body Map

Part Two: Connecting
4. Intended Mothers and Maternal Intentions
5. The Shifting Body

Part Three: Separating
6. Rites of Classification
7. ThlsÄ