Synopses & Reviews
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. Temanand#8217;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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and#8220;[A] thoughtful ethnography, possessing fluid yet technical writing that reads like a page-turning novel.and#8221;
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"Teman does a superb job . . . and in places her book reads like a novel."--Times Literary Supplement (Tls)
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"A great anthropological case study."--Jewish Review of Books
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"Academic and well-researched, moving and sensitive."--The Jerusalem Post
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and#8220;Clear, engaging writing . . . [Teman] presents the subject in a narrative form that keeps the reader excited to be turning pages.and#8221;
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and#8220;Teman does a superb job . . . and in places her book reads like a novel.and#8221;
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and#8220;A great anthropological case study.and#8221;
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“Academic and well-researched, moving and sensitive.” Deborah Moon - Jewish Review Of Books
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and#8220;Teman offers us fascinating data, on a disturbing situation, in a deliberately uncritical way.and#8221;
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“Clear, engaging writing . . . [Teman] presents the subject in a narrative form that keeps the reader excited to be turning pages.” Barbara Katz Rothman - Sociology Of Health and Illness
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and#8220;Academic and well-researched, moving and sensitive.and#8221;
Synopsis
"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
Synopsis
and#147;
Birthing a Mother is brilliant and beautifully written. It showcases Temanand#8217;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.and#8221;and#151;Charis Thompson, author of
Making Parentsand#147;Teman deftly portrays surrogacy as a joint project through which one woman assists another, through sacrifice and instruction, to become also a mother.and#8221;and#151;Heather Paxson, author of Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece
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