A Tale of Two Surrogates

Book

 

Teman, Elly. Birthing a mother: The surrogate body and the pregnant self. Univ of California Press, 2010.

 

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.

 

Link to Amazon page for Birthing a Mother

 

Selected Articles

 

•  Teman, Elly. (2019). The power of the single story in surrogacy. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health & Illness, 38(3), 282-294.

Analyzing interviews with 20 Jewish-Israeli gestational surrogates who gave birth in 2014–2016, I examine the common narrative structure of their personal stories and the way that this becomes what Adichie calls a "single story". This idealized, romanticized, utopian story includes: 1. an intimate bond between surrogate and intended parents; 2. an epic birth; 3. a happy ending, told publicly. After illustrating this structure, I present the consequences of this single story for surrogates whose experiences diverged from, yet were constantly compared to, the "perfect journey" narrative. Anthropologists of reproduction must pay careful attention to digital storytelling as a new reproductive technology.

Link to full text of article on surrogacy and the single story

 

• Teman, Elly. 2018. "A case for restrictive regulation of surrogacy? An Indo-Israeli comparison of ethnographic studies." In Sayani Mitra, Silke Schiktanz, Tulsi Patel (Eds.), Cross-cultural comparisons on surrogacy and egg donation: Interdisciplinary perspectives from India, Germany and Israel (Pp. 57-81). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

In this chapter, I compare qualitative research, primarily from ethnographic studies of surrogacy in two countries where it is regulated and practiced differently: Israel and India. My aim is to contribute to surrogacy-related policy discussions by comparatively analysing empirical work by sociologists and anthropologists on transnational Indian surrogacy with my own work on surrogacy in Israel. I ask: What are the main themes that arise from the ethnographic comparison of surrogacy research in Israel and India and how might these themes translate into more informed policy considerations? Can ethnographic conclusions help us formulate empirically-based criteria towards regulating surrogacy, and could restrictive regulation of surrogacy create the grounds for a more ethical practice?

Link to full text on Surrogacy in Israel and India Comparison

 

• Ivry, Tsipy & Teman, Elly. 2018. "Pregnant metaphors and surrogate meanings: bringing the ethnography of pregnancy and surrogacy into conversation in Israel and beyond." Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 32(2), 254-271.

This article explores the way that surrogacy and normal pregnancy share cultural assumptions about pregnancy. Through a juxtaposition of our ethnographic studies of two groups of Jewish-Israeli women-women who have undergone "normal," low-risk pregnancies and women who have given birth as gestational surrogates-we argue that surrogacy and pregnancy emerge as potent metaphors for one another. Both pregnant women and surrogates divided their bodies into two separate realms: fetus and maternal pregnant body. Both trivialized the effect of gestational influence on fetal health, making the fetus seem detached from gestational capacities of the mother. We argue for closer scrutiny of the way local cultural priorities and experiences of pregnancy shape surrogacy and for bringing the scholarship on pregnancy and on surrogacy into deeper conversation.

Link to full text of comparative article on surrogacy and pregnancy metaphors

 

• Teman, Elly. 2010. The last outpost of the nuclear family: A cultural critique of Israeli surrogacy policy. In: Kin, gene, community: Reproductive technologies among Jewish Israelis, 107-122.

In its present form, the Israeli surrogacy law prohibits single women, single men, and same sex couples from contracting a surrogate, and only permits single, divorced or widowed women to become surrogates. This dichotomic attitude towards the creation of alternative vs. classic nuclear families emerges within a cultural milieu which has other wise been regarded as supportive towards the creation of alternative families. This article addresses this incongruity through a cultural critique of the Israeli surrogacy law, focusing specifically on developments that have occurred in relation to contestations of this particular directive. I ask what is particular to surrogacy that made the state take such a restrictive stance toward the practice and in turn, convey such a conservative message about the type of family that surrogacy can legally aid to create. In the following, I compare surrogacy to other reproductive technologies, suggesting that surrogacy symbolically assaults traditional definitions of motherhood and family in ways that other NRTs do not. I suggest that in response the categories of mother nad family are singularly designated within the law and preserved through the surrogacy committee's regulatory practices. In conclusion, these findings are related to the gatekeeping practices of the nation and the ways in which the nation is constructed and maintained through the bodies and families of its citizens.

Link to full text of article on Israeli Surrogacy Policy

 

• Teman, Elly (2010). My Bun, Her Oven: Surrogacy as a Cultural Anomaly. Anthropology Now, 2(2), 33-41.

When a particular practice—in this case, surrogate motherhood—troubles so many scholars from other disciplines, anthropologists provide insights from previously underexplored perspectives. Without making value judgments, we try to look at the ways people involved in the practice give meanings to their actions. We try to understand the cultural perceptions that their words and actions belie. In my anthropological research on surrogacy, I have found that the metaphors and symbols that surrogate mothers draw upon to describe their bodies and their actions during surrogacy reveal widely accepted cultural perceptions of motherhood, family, and the human body. Perhaps even more significant, I see these same cultural patterns not only as influencing how surrogates respond to their role but also as informing how policymakers and thepublic at large react to surrogacy.

Link to full text of article on surrogacy as a cultural anomaly

 

• Teman, Elly (2009). Embodying surrogate motherhood: pregnancy as a dyadic body project. Body & Society, 15(3), 47-57.

This article examines pregnancy as a dyadic body-project within surrogate motherhood arrangements. In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the surrogate mother agrees to have an embryo that has been created using IVF, with the genetic materials of the intended parents or of anonymous donors, surgically implanted in her womb. Based on anthropological fieldwork among Jewish-Israeli surrogates and intended mothers involved in these arrangements, this article focuses upon the interactive identity management practices that the women jointly undertake during the pregnancy. For each side, creating an unambiguous definition of motherhood was central to their individual identity-work. For surrogates, the possible imputations of immorality required redefining pregnant embodiment as separate from maternal identity, while for intended mothers, the surrogate's embodiment of the pregnancy represented competing claims to their own maternity. Through verbal communication and through practices of disembodiment and vicarious embodiment, the women construct a 'shifting body' which they use to designate the social label of pregnancy, identity-building processes associated with pregnant embodiment, and even the lived experience of pregnancy. This example of a dyadic body-project contributes to the existing scholarship on the role of the body in the management of identity. While previous works have examined projects of the body as individualistic pursuits, the shifting body exemplifies that body-projects can be collaborative, dual forms of identity-work and that pregnancy can be the site of these projects. 

Keywords: embodiment, medical anthropology, motherhood, pregnancy, reproduction

Link to full text of article on surrogacy embodiment as a dyadic body project

 

• Teman, Elly. 2008. The Social Construction of Surrogacy Research: An Anthropological Critique of the Psychosocial Scholarship on Surrogate Motherhood. Social Science & Medicine 67(7):1104-12.

This article presents a critical appraisal of the psychosocial empirical research on surrogate mothers, their motivations for entering into surrogacy agreements and the outcome of their participation. I apply a social constructionist approach toward analyzing the scholarship, arguing that the cultural assumption that "normal" women do not voluntarily become pregnant with the premeditated intention of relinquishing the child for money, together with the assumption that "normal" women "naturally" bond with the children they bear, frames much of this research. I argue that this scholarship reveals how Western assumptions about motherhood and family impact upon scientific research. In their attempt to research the anomalous phenomenon of surrogacy, these researchers respond to the cultural anxieties that the practice provokes by framing their research methodologies and questions in a manner that upholds essentialist gendered assumptions about the naturalness and normalness of motherhood and childbearing. This leads the researchers to overlook the intrinsic value of the women's personal experiences and has implications for social policy.

Link to full text of Social Construction of Surrogacy Research

 

•  Teman, Elly (2006). Bonding with the field: On researching surrogate motherhood arrangements in Israel. In A.M. Gardner & D.M. Hoffman (Eds.) Dispatches from the field: Neophite ethnographers in a changing world (Pp. 79-194). Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press. 

 This essay addresses my perspective during the course of fieldwork on the topic of surrogate motherhood in Israel. In a surrogacy arrangement, a woman is contracted to bear a child for a couple to whom she will relinquish the child, usually in exchange for monetary reimbursement. Gestational surrogacy – the variant that I studied – refers to a specific variation of the process in which a fertilized egg, created through in-vitro fertilization from the intended couple's gametes, is surgically implanted in the surrogate's womb. Unlike an anthropologist who travels to a foreign country or conducts research for a limited period on a group to whom he or she is foreign, I am a Jewish-Israeli woman and live no more than six hours away from any of my informants. Therefore, my research has not been limited by time or place. As a result, I've been "in the field" for over seven years. During this time, I have kept in close contact with many of my informants, reinterviewing them repeatedly and taking part in their lives, to the point that many of my initial informants have turned into personal friends. It is the precarious anthropologist-informant relationship and the friendship that these relationships sometimes span that I address here.

Link to full text of Bonding with the Field

 

• Teman, Elly (2003). The medicalization of 'nature' in the artificial body: surrogate motherhood in Israel. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 17(1), 78-98.

In this article, I draw on anthropological and feminist scholarship on the body and the nature/culture divide as a framework for understanding the place of surrogate mothers in a conceptual ideology that connects motherhood with nature. I explore links between the medicalization of childbirth in Israel and the personal agency of surrogate mothers as relayed through interviews. Taking the patriarchal context of the Israeli surrogacy law of 1996 into consideration, I underscore surrogates' imaginative use of medical metaphors as tools for the subversion of surrogacy's threatening social connotations. By redefining the surrogate body as "artificial" and locating "nature" in the commissioning mother's body, surrogates adopt medical rhetoric to transform surrogacy from a transgressive act into an alternative route toward achieving normative Israeli national reproductive goals.

Link to full text of Medicalization of Nature in Surrogacy article

 

• Teman, Elly (2003). Knowing the surrogate body in Israel. In R. Cook & S. D. Schlater (Eds.), Surrogate motherhood: International perspectives (Pp. 261-279). London: Hart Press.

Surrogate motherhod is an anomaly that that disrupts familiar conceptions of motherhood, kinship and family. How do surrogates and intended mothers accommodate and resist the anomalous connotations of this reproductive strategy' How do they assess and negotiate their own positions in Israeli society through surrogacy' I will argue that throughout the surrogacy process, surrogates and intended mothers, together with doctors, nurses and ultrasound technicians, collectively generate alterations in received scripts about the maternal nature of pregnant bodies and the non-maternal makeup of infertile bodies. I shall engage the concept of 'authoritative knowledge' in order to shed light on these questions.

Link to full text of article on surrogacy and authoritative knowledge