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 ca...

Buy Now From Amazon

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.

Similar Products

Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of SexualityTravesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)God's Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the AndesBirthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (California Series in Public Anthropology)Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Experimental Futures)