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Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self Review

For a long time now, surrogacy has been criticized on multiple fronts. Popular accounts tend to portray people who volunteer to be surrogates as somehow emotionally aberrant for their ability to give up a child they brought to term. Press stories often focus on rare cases where a custody dispute results. Meanwhile, many academic feminists have railed against it as a form of economic and technological exploitation.

You'll find none of that here. Temin burrowed deeply and intimately into the lives of surrogates, intended mothers, and the relationships between the two in this ethnographic study. In the process, she uncovered the motivations of surrogates and the strategies they use, in a sense, to "give" the pregnancy to the intended mother. For the women Teman studied, meaningful human bonds and new identities were were forged as a result. In this way, the book demolishes popular negative stereotypes of surrogacy. At heart, this is a story of a pair of women -- a surrogate and an intended mother -- coming together in a life-affirming act of cooperation to create a new mother.
The story takes place in Israel, where the process is stringently overseen by the government and where the government-run healthcare system provides generously for in vitro fertilization and medical care. So in these and other ways there are differences between the cultural context in Israel, the US, Europe and other places. The author does a good job of helping the reader to understand those differences. But what still comes through is the profound humanity behind surrogacy: reproductive technologies can be appropriated by women for their own purposes and used in ways that are life-affirming and beneficial for the people who use them.
The book is designed as an anthropological study and does make reference to some concepts from anthropology, sociology and other fields, but avoids of a lot of academic jargon. The non-academic reader should find relatively smooth sailing after the introductory materials where some anthropological background to the subject is reviewed. Whether it changes your perception of surrogacy is for you to decide, but it's a well written and engaging read. I would recommend this book to people interested in surrogacy, feminism, reproductive technology and its social impact, international comparisons of reproductive policy, or Israeli culture, especially in relation to pregnancy and motherhood.

Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self 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.

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