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University of California Press

Birthing a Mother

The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self
by Elly Teman (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $95.00 / £80.00
Publication Date: Mar 2010
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780520259638
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 11 b/w photographs, 1 line illustration
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About the Book

Birthing a Mother is 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. Teman’s 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.

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

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. The Surrogate's Gift

Part Four: Redefining
8. The Surrogate's Mission
9. The Hero's Quest

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“Teman’s book is an exhaustive, thoughtful ethnography, possessing fluid yet technical writing that reads like a page-turning novel. It will no doubt become a seminal work in the fields of feminism, anthropology, and assisted reproduction.”
— Practical Matters
“Teman does a superb job . . . and in places her book reads like a novel.”
— Times Literary Supplement (TLS)
“A great anthropological case study.”
— Jewish Review Of Books
“Academic and well-researched, moving and sensitive.”
— The Jerusalem Post
“Teman offers us fascinating data, on a disturbing situation, in a deliberately uncritical way.”
— Sociology Of Health & Illness
“Teman’s book meets the highest standards of scholarship and clear, engaging writing, and presents the subject in a narrative form that keeps the reader excited to be turning pages.”
— Birth: Issues In Perinatal Care
“[Teman’s] study is likely to be important for policy-makers as well as anyone interested in, or indeed involved with, this burgeoning subculture.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“Birthing a Mother is brilliant and beautifully written. It showcases Teman’s 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 of Making 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 of Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece

Awards

  • Stirling Prize for Best Published Work in Psychological Anthropology 2010, American Anthropological Association
  • Diana Forsythe Prize 2010, American Anthropology Association
  • Sociology of Health and Illness Prize Short List 2011, British Sociological Association
  • Eileen Basker Memorial Prize 2010, Society for Medical Anthropology