Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self

Elly Teman
University of California Press, March 2010
Birthing a Mother is the first ethnography to probe the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. 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. Birthing a Mother would be a great text for courses in sociology, anthropology and gender studies that are concerned with medicalization, reproductive technologies, kinship and family, body and embodiment, nationalism and religion, and technology and society. (2/10)