Dear colleagues,
I am happy to share with you the publication of Birthing a Mother, my book on the embodiment and experience of gestational surrogacy. I look forward to hearing your feedback. Apologies for any cross posting.

Birthing a Mother
The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self
Elly Teman
University of California Press

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11401.php

Birthing a Mother is the first ethnography to probe the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. 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 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

“Absolutely wonderful – Birthing a Mother flows like a novel. And in addition to its outstanding scholarship, it serves as a kind of ‘how to’ guide for potential surrogates and intended parents. This is fieldwork at its best.” —Robbie Davis-Floyd, editor of Birth Models that Work and author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage

"This spectacular ethnography is a must-read for anthropologists, sociologists, women's studies scholars, and their students. Birthing a Mother brilliantly brings us into a world where surrogates and intended mothers develop a relationship but a surrogate is disassociated from the fetus growing in her womb."
Diane L. Wolf, author of Beyond Anne Frank


Sample chapter

Birthing a Mother--UC Press publisher’s catalog

cloth   978-0-520-25963-8  $55.00
paper   978-0-520-25964-5   $21.95


On sale now on Amazon.com for $14.81

Birthing a Mother would be a great text for courses in sociology, anthropology and gender studies that are concerned with medicalization, reproductive technologies, kinship and family, body and embodiment, nationalism and religion, and technology and society.

If you are interested in an evaluation or desk copy of Birthing a Mother, please see the University of California Press Books for Course Use policy.



--
Elly Teman, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University of Pennsylvania
Penn Center for the Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies (Penn CIGHT)
Division of Medical Genetics
1112 Penn Tower
Email: [log in to unmask]
Website: http://mslula.googlepages.com

Book: Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self
Publisher website: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11401.php
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Birthing-Mother-Surrogate-Body-Pregnant/dp/0520259645/