Birthing a Mother
The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of California Press
Published:16th Mar '10
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

"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.
"[A] thoughtful ethnography, possessing fluid yet technical writing that reads like a page-turning novel." Practical Matters "Teman does a superb job ... and in places her book reads like a novel." -- Michele Pridmore-Brown Times Literary Supplement (TLS) "A great anthropological case study." -- Deborah Moon Jewish Review Of Books "Academic and well-researched, moving and sensitive." -- Judy Siegel-Itzkovich The Jerusalem Post "Teman offers us fascinating data, on a disturbing situation, in a deliberately uncritical way." -- Barbara Katz Rothman Sociology Of Health & Illness "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
ISBN: 9780520259645
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 23mm
Weight: 544g
384 pages