Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self / Edition 1

by Elly Teman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520259645
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/04/2010
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.89(d)

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 xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Prologue: Yael xvii

Introduction 1

Part 1 Dividing

1 Surrogate Selves and Embodied Others 31

2 The Body Map 54

3 Operationalizing the Body Map 75

Part 2 Connecting

4 Intended Mothers and Maternal Intentions 110

5 The Shifting Body 134

Part 3 Separating

6 Rites of Classification 184

7 The Surrogate's Gift 205

Part 4 Redefining

8 The Surrogate's Mission 238

9 The Hero's Quest 263

Conclusion 283

Notes 297

Bibliography 335

Index 353

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[A] thoughtful ethnography, possessing fluid yet technical writing that reads like a page-turning novel."—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

"Clear, engaging writing . . . [Teman] presents the subject in a narrative form that keeps the reader excited to be turning pages."—Birth: Issues
In Perinatal Care

Editorial Reviews

Academic and well-researched, moving and sensitive.

The Jerusalem Post - Judy Siegel-Itzkovich

A great anthropological case study.

Jewish Review Of Books - Deborah Moon

Teman does a superb job . . . and in places her book reads like a novel.

Times Literary Supplement (TLS) - Michele Pridmore-Brown

Teman offers us fascinating data, on a disturbing situation, in a deliberately uncritical way.

Sociology Of Health & Illness - Barbara Katz Rothman

Clear, engaging writing . . . [Teman] presents the subject in a narrative form that keeps the reader excited to be turning pages.

Birth: Issues In Perinatal Care - Robbie Davis-Floyd

[A] thoughtful ethnography, possessing fluid yet technical writing that reads like a page-turning novel.

Practical Matters