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About author Elly Teman

ELLY TEMAN

Elly Teman is an associate professor of medical anthropology in the Dept. of Behavioral Sciences at Ruppin Academic Center, Israel. She was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022-23 and a Research Associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in 2023-24. She is the author of an ethnography on gestational surrogacy in Israel entitled Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) which won three book prizes from the American Anthropological Association, including the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, Stirling Prize, and Diana Forsythe Prize and was a finalist for the Sociology of Health and Illness book prize from the British Sociological Association. Her publications have appeared in Social Science and Medicine, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, and elsewhere. These publications include articles on surrogacy policy, on the surrogacy experiences of gestational surrogates and intended mothers, and on ultra-orthodox Haredi women's conceptualizations of pregnancy, prenatal diagnosis and moral decision-making. Elly has also studied the path of religious "strengthening" among incarcerated Jewish men in Israeli prisons. Her most downloaded article, however, is a cultural history of the "red string". Elly is currently exploring ways of communicating anthropological research findings through comic art.

Birthing a Mother: the Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self

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 purchase Birthing a Mother on Amazon

 

"Birthing a Mother is a beautifully and carefully written ethnographic analysis of the intimate emotional experiences of women who elect to provide the gift of maternity to those who are unable to bear a child...(and) their first-hand accounts of how they anticipated, managed, confronted, and rebuffed the inevitably complicated medical and legal dynamics of their experience."

---Denise D Bielby of Birthing a Mother in Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2011, 40(2).

 

"The individual experience of the surrogates and intended mothers as well as the relationship between the surrogate and the intended mother is at the heart of Birthing a Mother. Many readers will likely be surprised at the difference between commonly conveyed constructions of surrogacy and the actual experiences and expectations of intended mothers and surrogates that emerge in the book."

---Cindy A. Stearns of Birthing a Mother in Symbolic Interaction, 2012, 35 (1):101-103.

 

"The book also has the practical, applied, public, and very useful ability to serve as a kind of ''how to'' guide for potential surrogates, intended parents, and the health workers who care for them. One can easily learn from it what works and what does not in the surrogate baby- intended parent relationship, and how to maximize and make healthful, and not damaging, the experience for all parties."

---Robbie Davis-Floyd of Birthing a Mother in Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, 2011, 38 (2).

 

"What I like most about Birthing a mother is the way the author pays careful attention to issues of space and place at a range of geographical scales, from the body to the globe. Teman, although an anthropologist rather than a geographer, recognizes that different scales overlap, and are fluid and contingent. As a result, she moves seamlessly between scales, especially between the scales of the body and the nation."

---Robyn Longhurst of Birthing a Mother in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, 881-922.

 

 

Elly Teman's Academic Articles on Surrogacy

Links to full text included where available

 

In English:

Publications on Surrogacy in Hebrew, French, and Spanish

Co-authored Comparative Articles on Surrogacy by Elly Teman and Zsuzsa Berend

  • Teman, Elly, & Berend, Zsuzsa. 2022. Individual responsibility or trust in the state: A comparison of surrogates' legal consciousness. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 63(5-6), 265-284.

Drawing on ethnographic research in the United States and Israel, two countries that have long-term experience with surrogacy, we compare surrogates' understanding of, approaches to, and expectations about regulation. Women who become surrogates in these two countries hold opposite views about regulation. US surrogates formulate their rejection of standardized regulation—including standardized screening and contracts—by emphasizing their own responsibility for the legal, relational, and medical aspects of surrogate pregnancy. They want more oversight of fertility clinics and surrogacy agencies but ultimately argue for individual accountability. Israeli surrogates, conversely, support centralized government regulation of the practice and even defend Israel's centralized regulation of surrogacy; many advocate for the extension of the law and the state to assume more responsibility for these arrangements. We discuss these differing formations of legal consciousness in terms of Engel's conceptualization of "individualism emphasizing personal responsibility" versus "rights-oriented individualism."

Keywords: Comparative ethnography, neoliberalism, contracts, legal consciousness, regulation, surrogacy

Link to full text of our comparative article of surrogates' legal consciousness 

 

  •  Teman, Elly, and Zsuzsa Berend. 2021. "Surrogacy as a family project: How surrogates articulate familial identity and belonging." Journal of Family Issues 42 (6): 1143-1165.

This paper explores how surrogates negotiate the meaning of familial belonging and family identity when they discuss surrogacy with their husband, children, and other relatives. We suggest that surrogacy necessitates reflexive explication of what a family is and how this family is implicated in surrogacy. Our comparative study analyzes ethnographic data on Israeli and US surrogates to illuminate key similarities in surrogates' strategies vis-a-vis their husband and children, pointing to the importance of daily family practices in how people understand family belonging. First, we map out the ways surrogates engage their husbands in order to gain their support and protect their nuclear family unit before entering the process. Next, we look at how surrogates explain surrogacy to their children in efforts to clarify siblingship and the boundaries between the two families, and to make surrogacy into an educational family project. We analyze the metaphors and rituals in surrogates' family-bounding practices.

Keywords: Surrogacy, surrogate mothers, familial belonging, family identity, children of surrogates

 Link to full text of Surrogacy as a family project

 

  •  Teman, Elly and Zsuzsa Berend, 2020. Surrogate Non-Motherhood: Israeli and US surrogates speak about kinship and parenthood, in: Zeynep B. Gürtin, Charlotte Faircloth (eds.), Conceiving Contemporary Parenthood:Imagining, Achieving and Accounting for Parenthood in New Family Forms, London: Routledge. Also printed in: Anthropology & Medicine, 25(3), 296-310.

Drawing on a comparison of two ethnographic research projects on surrogacy in the United States and Israel, this paper explores surrogates' views about motherhood and parenthood, relationships and relatedness. The paper challenges three myths of surrogacy: that surrogates bond with the babies they carry for intended parents, that it is immoral not to acknowledge the surrogates' maternity, and that surrogacy upsets the moral order of society by dehumanizing and commodifying reproduction. Contrasting the similarities and differences in the voices of surrogates from these studies, the authors argue that surrogates draw on ideas about technology, genetics and intent in order to explain that they do not bond with the child because they are not its mother. This is followed by an exploration of surrogates' definitions of what constitutes parenthood, suggesting that in both contexts, surrogates draw clear boundaries between their own family and that of the intended parents. Finally, it is suggested that surrogates expect a relationship, or a bond, to develop with the intended parents and view their contribution as exceptional moral work which involves nurturing, caring, friendship and solidarity. The paper concludes that for surrogates in the USA and in Israel, maternity, bonding and kin-ties are not automatic outcomes of pregnancy, but a choice. Surrogates in both contexts hold that bonding with other people's children as if they were one's own is wrong while bonding with their couple and creating 'fictive kin' ties with them is the logical outcome of the intense and intimate process of collaborative baby-making.

Keywords: Surrogate mothers; bonding; ethnography; maternity; relatedness; surrogacy

Link to full text of our comparative article on surrogate non-motherhood

 

  •  Teman, Elly, and Zsuzsa Berend. 2021. "Unsustainable Surrogacy Practices: What We Can Learn from a Comparative Assessment." Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times, pages 115-127.

What are best practices in surrogacy and what are unsustainable ones? Comparing our long-term ethnographic studies of gestational surrogacy in Israel and in the United States, we analytically explore practices and outcomes we have found to be unsustainable in surrogacy agreements. We then outline three key finding that explain better outcomes for babies and surrogates: regulated contracts, standardized screening of all participants, and supportive relationships between participants. By shedding comparative light on practices emergent from the "field," whether sustainable or not, we can better identify the central regulatory mechanisms that may shield surrogacy participants from harm.

Keywords: surrogacy, surrogacy contracts, regulation, screening, intended parents

Link to full text of our comparative article on Unsustainable Surrogacy Practices

Elly Teman's Articles on Other Topics

Links to full text where available

 

Academic Articles co-authored with Tsipy Ivry on Haredi Ultra-Orthodox Women, Pregnancy, and Prenatal Diagnosis

 

 

Academic articles co-authored with Michal Morag on Religious Strengthening in Israeli Prisons

 


Academic Articles on Other Topics

 

 

 

 

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