Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self » (1st Edition)

"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

List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Prologue: Yael xvii

Introduction 1

Part 1 Dividing

1 Surrogate Selves and Embodied Others 31

2 The Body Map 54

3 Operationalizing the Body Map 75

Part 2 Connecting

4 Intended Mothers and Maternal Intentions 110

5 The Shifting Body 134

Part 3 Separating

6 Rites of Classification 184

7 The Surrogate's Gift 205

Part 4 Redefining

8 The Surrogate's Mission 238

9 The Hero's Quest 263

Conclusion 283

Notes 297

Bibliography 335

Index 353