Birthing a Mother - by Elly Teman (Paperback)

About the Book

""Birthing a Mother" is brilliant and beautifully written. It showcases Teman'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."--Charis Thompson, author of "Making Parents"
"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"

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"Birthing a Mother is brilliant and beautifully written. It showcases Teman'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."--Charis Thompson, author of Making Parents

"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

Review Quotes

"[A] thoughtful ethnography, possessing fluid yet technical writing that reads like a page-turning novel."-- "Practical Matters" (6/7/2011 12:00:00 AM)

"A great anthropological case study."--Deborah Moon "Jewish Review Of Books" (7/20/2010 12:00:00 AM)

"Academic and well-researched, moving and sensitive."--Judy Siegel-Itzkovich "The Jerusalem Post" (7/20/2011 12:00:00 AM)

"Clear, engaging writing . . . [Teman] presents the subject in a narrative form that keeps the reader excited to be turning pages."--Robbie Davis-Floyd "Birth: Issues In Perinatal Care" (6/1/2011 12:00:00 AM)

"Teman does a superb job . . . and in places her book reads like a novel."--Michele Pridmore-Brown "Times Literary Supplement (TLS)" (6/4/2010 12:00:00 AM)

"Teman offers us fascinating data, on a disturbing situation, in a deliberately uncritical way."--Barbara Katz Rothman "Sociology Of Health & Illness" (7/9/2012 12:00:00 AM)

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.