This is the introduction to Birthing a Mother (an ethnography about gestational surrogates and in... more This is the introduction to Birthing a Mother (an ethnography about gestational surrogates and intended mothers) as well as the first chapter on the surrogate's experience of the surrogacy process.
Birthing a Mother is the first ethnography to probe the intimate experience of gestational surrog... more 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.
Studies on reproductive technologies often examine women’s reproductive
lives in terms of choice ... more Studies on reproductive technologies often examine women’s reproductive lives in terms of choice and control. Drawing on 48 accounts of procreative experiences of religiously devout Jewish women in Israel and the US, we examine their attitudes, understandings and experiences of pregnancy, reproductive technologies and prenatal testing. We suggest that the concept of hishtadlut— ’’obligatory effort’’—works as an explanatory model that organizes Haredi women’s reproductive careers and their negotiations of reproductive technologies. As an elastic category with negotiable and dynamic boundaries, hishtadlut gives ultraorthodox Jewish women room for effort without the assumption of control; it allows them to exercise discretion in relation to medical issues without framing their efforts in terms of individual choice. Haredi women hold themselves responsible for making their obligatory effort and not for pregnancy outcomes. We suggest that an alternative paradigm to autonomous choice and control emerges from cosmological orders where reproductive duties constitute ‘‘obligatory choices.’’
This entry describes women's experiences of pregnancy across cultures. In every sociocultural—and... more This entry describes women's experiences of pregnancy across cultures. In every sociocultural—and political—setting, women's pregnancies are managed and regulated in accordance with local, regional, and national knowledge systems and beliefs about women's and men's roles in creating health and illness throughout gestation, childbirth, and the nurturance of future members of society. The entry details the development of the field of the anthropology of reproduction, and the subfields of the anthropology of pregnancy, childbirth, and the new reproductive technologies. It encompasses ethnotheories of conception, kinship, and sexuality, as well as the medicalization of pregnancy/prenatal care and birth, and describes the major discontinuities between earlier traditions and modern practice, pointing to a need for more up-to-date ethnographic research focused on pregnancy. The authors sketch the main theoretical concerns and empirical patterns that arise in past and present ethnographic research on pregnancy, and review earlier ethnographic accounts of pregnancy and current studies of technological reproduction through a unified theoretical lens. Our perspective analyzes both current scientific theories of conception and gestation and ethnotheories of procreation in premodern non-Euro-American societies as culturally bound systems of discourse and practice.
Elly Teman hat acht Jahre lang in Israel zu Leihmutterschaft geforscht, um den üblicherweise rein... more Elly Teman hat acht Jahre lang in Israel zu Leihmutterschaft geforscht, um den üblicherweise rein theoretischen Diskurs mit konkreten Befunden zu überprüfen. Die Ergebnisse überraschen. Der Text ist ist eine stark gekürzte und überarbeitete Version der Einleitung aus: Elly Teman: Birthing a Mother. The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. University of California Press, 2010. Übersetzung aus dem Englischen: Lea Susemichel. an.sclhlläge Oktober 2011
When a particular practice—in this case, surrogate motherhood—troubles so many scholars from othe... more 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.
Elly Teman est une anthropologue culturelle et médicale de University of Pennsylvania. Son livre,... more Elly Teman est une anthropologue culturelle et médicale de University of Pennsylvania. Son livre, Birthing a Mother : the Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self (2010), qui est une étude ethnographique de la gestation pour autrui en Israël, a gagné trois prestigieux prix de l’American Anthropological Association. Pour le colloque C.L.A.R.A., elle a rédigé cette intervention.
4ème Colloque International de l’Association C.L.A.R.A Gestation Pour Autrui : comment mettre en place un processus éthique ? Samedi 13 novembre 2010 Mairie du IIIème, Paris
Introduction In 1991 the Ministers of Health and Justice in Israel nominated a pub-lic committee ... more Introduction In 1991 the Ministers of Health and Justice in Israel nominated a pub-lic committee to prepare a proposal for legislation on in-vitro fertil-ization and surrogate motherhood (Benshushan and Schenker 1997, 1832). 1 Following the cancellation of strictures banning surrogacy ...
This is the introduction to Birthing a Mother (an ethnography about gestational surrogates and in... more This is the introduction to Birthing a Mother (an ethnography about gestational surrogates and intended mothers) as well as the first chapter on the surrogate's experience of the surrogacy process.
Birthing a Mother is the first ethnography to probe the intimate experience of gestational surrog... more 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.
Studies on reproductive technologies often examine women’s reproductive
lives in terms of choice ... more Studies on reproductive technologies often examine women’s reproductive lives in terms of choice and control. Drawing on 48 accounts of procreative experiences of religiously devout Jewish women in Israel and the US, we examine their attitudes, understandings and experiences of pregnancy, reproductive technologies and prenatal testing. We suggest that the concept of hishtadlut— ’’obligatory effort’’—works as an explanatory model that organizes Haredi women’s reproductive careers and their negotiations of reproductive technologies. As an elastic category with negotiable and dynamic boundaries, hishtadlut gives ultraorthodox Jewish women room for effort without the assumption of control; it allows them to exercise discretion in relation to medical issues without framing their efforts in terms of individual choice. Haredi women hold themselves responsible for making their obligatory effort and not for pregnancy outcomes. We suggest that an alternative paradigm to autonomous choice and control emerges from cosmological orders where reproductive duties constitute ‘‘obligatory choices.’’
This entry describes women's experiences of pregnancy across cultures. In every sociocultural—and... more This entry describes women's experiences of pregnancy across cultures. In every sociocultural—and political—setting, women's pregnancies are managed and regulated in accordance with local, regional, and national knowledge systems and beliefs about women's and men's roles in creating health and illness throughout gestation, childbirth, and the nurturance of future members of society. The entry details the development of the field of the anthropology of reproduction, and the subfields of the anthropology of pregnancy, childbirth, and the new reproductive technologies. It encompasses ethnotheories of conception, kinship, and sexuality, as well as the medicalization of pregnancy/prenatal care and birth, and describes the major discontinuities between earlier traditions and modern practice, pointing to a need for more up-to-date ethnographic research focused on pregnancy. The authors sketch the main theoretical concerns and empirical patterns that arise in past and present ethnographic research on pregnancy, and review earlier ethnographic accounts of pregnancy and current studies of technological reproduction through a unified theoretical lens. Our perspective analyzes both current scientific theories of conception and gestation and ethnotheories of procreation in premodern non-Euro-American societies as culturally bound systems of discourse and practice.
Elly Teman hat acht Jahre lang in Israel zu Leihmutterschaft geforscht, um den üblicherweise rein... more Elly Teman hat acht Jahre lang in Israel zu Leihmutterschaft geforscht, um den üblicherweise rein theoretischen Diskurs mit konkreten Befunden zu überprüfen. Die Ergebnisse überraschen. Der Text ist ist eine stark gekürzte und überarbeitete Version der Einleitung aus: Elly Teman: Birthing a Mother. The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. University of California Press, 2010. Übersetzung aus dem Englischen: Lea Susemichel. an.sclhlläge Oktober 2011
When a particular practice—in this case, surrogate motherhood—troubles so many scholars from othe... more 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.
Elly Teman est une anthropologue culturelle et médicale de University of Pennsylvania. Son livre,... more Elly Teman est une anthropologue culturelle et médicale de University of Pennsylvania. Son livre, Birthing a Mother : the Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self (2010), qui est une étude ethnographique de la gestation pour autrui en Israël, a gagné trois prestigieux prix de l’American Anthropological Association. Pour le colloque C.L.A.R.A., elle a rédigé cette intervention.
4ème Colloque International de l’Association C.L.A.R.A Gestation Pour Autrui : comment mettre en place un processus éthique ? Samedi 13 novembre 2010 Mairie du IIIème, Paris
Introduction In 1991 the Ministers of Health and Justice in Israel nominated a pub-lic committee ... more Introduction In 1991 the Ministers of Health and Justice in Israel nominated a pub-lic committee to prepare a proposal for legislation on in-vitro fertil-ization and surrogate motherhood (Benshushan and Schenker 1997, 1832). 1 Following the cancellation of strictures banning surrogacy ...
"This article presents a critical appraisal of the psychosocial empirical research on surrogate m... more "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.
"This article examines pregnancy as a dyadic body-project within surrogate motherhood arrangement... more "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.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Jan 1, 2006
... 304 pgs. $59.95 Reviewed by Elly Teman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ... In sum, Weisbe... more ... 304 pgs. $59.95 Reviewed by Elly Teman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ... In sum, Weisberg marvels at how Israel's surrogate motherhood arrangements can work so well and how other countries can learn from the Israeli example. ...
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lives in terms of choice and control. Drawing on 48 accounts of procreative
experiences of religiously devout Jewish women in Israel and the US, we examine
their attitudes, understandings and experiences of pregnancy, reproductive technologies
and prenatal testing. We suggest that the concept of hishtadlut—
’’obligatory effort’’—works as an explanatory model that organizes Haredi women’s
reproductive careers and their negotiations of reproductive technologies. As an
elastic category with negotiable and dynamic boundaries, hishtadlut gives ultraorthodox
Jewish women room for effort without the assumption of control; it allows
them to exercise discretion in relation to medical issues without framing their efforts
in terms of individual choice. Haredi women hold themselves responsible for
making their obligatory effort and not for pregnancy outcomes. We suggest that an
alternative paradigm to autonomous choice and control emerges from cosmological
orders where reproductive duties constitute ‘‘obligatory choices.’’
Der Text ist ist eine stark gekürzte und überarbeitete Version der Einleitung aus: Elly Teman: Birthing a Mother. The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. University of California
Press, 2010. Übersetzung aus dem Englischen: Lea Susemichel. an.sclhlläge Oktober 2011
4ème Colloque International de l’Association C.L.A.R.A Gestation Pour Autrui : comment mettre en place un processus éthique ? Samedi 13 novembre 2010 Mairie du IIIème, Paris
lives in terms of choice and control. Drawing on 48 accounts of procreative
experiences of religiously devout Jewish women in Israel and the US, we examine
their attitudes, understandings and experiences of pregnancy, reproductive technologies
and prenatal testing. We suggest that the concept of hishtadlut—
’’obligatory effort’’—works as an explanatory model that organizes Haredi women’s
reproductive careers and their negotiations of reproductive technologies. As an
elastic category with negotiable and dynamic boundaries, hishtadlut gives ultraorthodox
Jewish women room for effort without the assumption of control; it allows
them to exercise discretion in relation to medical issues without framing their efforts
in terms of individual choice. Haredi women hold themselves responsible for
making their obligatory effort and not for pregnancy outcomes. We suggest that an
alternative paradigm to autonomous choice and control emerges from cosmological
orders where reproductive duties constitute ‘‘obligatory choices.’’
Der Text ist ist eine stark gekürzte und überarbeitete Version der Einleitung aus: Elly Teman: Birthing a Mother. The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. University of California
Press, 2010. Übersetzung aus dem Englischen: Lea Susemichel. an.sclhlläge Oktober 2011
4ème Colloque International de l’Association C.L.A.R.A Gestation Pour Autrui : comment mettre en place un processus éthique ? Samedi 13 novembre 2010 Mairie du IIIème, Paris
Keywords: Surrogate motherhood; Surrogacy; Infertility; Reproduction; Gestational carrier; Gender"
Key Words: embodiment • medical anthropology • motherhood • pregnancy • reproduction"