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APRIL 1, 2010 •NISSAN 17, 5770
Ex-Portlander’s surrogacy book draws on Israel study
BY DEBORAH MOON
Jewish Review
While a Portland native’s new
book on surrogacy focuses on a
study in Israel, the country with
the world’s first and most exten-
sive surrogacy regulations, the hu-
man experience of dealing with
that strange situation is common to
other surrogates around the world.
Elly Teman’s “Birthing a
Mother: The Surrogate Body
and the Pregnant Self,” published
March 4 by University of Califor-
nia Press, is based on the author’s
PhD dissertation research at He-
brew University in Jerusalem. A
third-generation Portland native,
Teman attended Hillel Academy
and Congregation Shaarie Torah,
where her grandparents Ruth and
Robert Erlich are still members.
Her great-grandmother Tillie
Nepom arrived in Portland in 1913
at the age of 13, just months older
than Teman was when she moved
to Israel with her parents Rhisa
and Nissan Teman at age 12½.
Israel’s “Embryo Carrying
Agreements Law” had just legal-
ized gestational surrogacy when
Teman began her graduate studies.
She said she immediately thought
it would be a great anthropologi-
cal case study. She began her PhD
studies in 1998, just after the first
surrogate birth in Israel, which
“went wrong” and drew intense
scrutiny of “what not to do in sur-
ELLY TEMAN
rogacy,” she said. The resulting
furor created even more intense
regulation of surrogacy in Israel.
A cultural anthropologist,
Teman decided to look at the
strange situation of a couple hav-
ing another woman carry their
baby and how the surrogate deals
with “being pregnant while not
expecting a baby.”
“The human experience of
making sense of this predicament
is common to other surrogates in
other places,” she said.
Teman said all couples consid-
ering surrogacy fear that the sur-
rogate mother will bond with the
baby, such as in the famed Baby
M case in which the surrogate
mother fought a court battle to
retain custody of the baby.
“When you read this book and
Health
listen to the words of women act-
ing as surrogates, they are making
informed, rational decisions,” said
Teman, noting that in Israel the
women are gestational surrogates
who conceive through invitro fertil-
ization rather than the artificial in-
semination that made Baby M the
genetic daughter of the surrogate.
“They see how high the stakes
are for the technology to work and
they see how much the couple has
riding on it to become parents,”
she said. “From the beginning,
surrogates talk about dividing
themselves … referring to their
belly area as ‘not me.’ They have
to mark their limits to remember
where their boundaries are.”
In Israel, a small country where
the farthest surrogates could live
from the couple is four hours, sur-
rogates often form strong bonds
with the couple for whom they
are carrying a child, Teman said.
She added that sharing a lan-
guage and culture also help unite
them. (Israeli law requires the
host and genetic mother to be the
same religion).
“They (surrogate mothers)
don’t want to be choked and tak-
en over, but they do want to share
the experience with the ‘intended
mother’ (as the genetic mother is
known in Israeli law),” she said.
The intended mother fre-
quently accompanies the sur-
rogate to all doctor’s appointe-
ments, takes home the ultrasound
pictures and does the things they
think pregnant women do. The
mother is usually with the surro-
gate during the birth process.
Teman said that “they transition
into being a mother through the
process.” She said some of the wom-
en she studied actually had a pseudo
pregnancy, gaining weight and feel-
ing contractions. Two women, with
no hormone injections, spontane-
ously developed breast milk.
In Israel, the laws aid the pro-
cess, calling the surrogate the
“carrying mother” and the biolog-
ical mother the “intended moth-
er.” Culturally, the difference is
even stronger with the surrogate
commonly being referred to as an
“Innkeeper, who is hosting this
family coming into being.”
Israeli law, originally written to
JEWISH REVIEW
ensure children were halachically
Jewish, has expanded over the
years to protect the surrogate’s
mental and physical health, as
well as the intended parents’
rights. A state committee must
approve every surrogate arrange-
ment. The committee screens the
surrogate and the couple psycho-
logically and medically screens
the surrogate. The committee
ensures the contract is valid and
that it provides for contingencies
such as what happens if the baby
has a birth defect or who will the
guardians be if the parents die be-
fore the birth.
Conversely in the United
States, regulations vary from state
to state and even between differ-
ent surrogate agencies in the same
state.
In Israel, Teman said surro-
gates are much more open about
being paid for their effort. All Is-
raeli surrogates are single women,
many single mothers who use the
money to raise their own children.
“It doesn’t mean it’s not a
mitzvah just because they are us-
ing the money to get ahead,” Te-
man said the surrogates reason.
Teman is now a research fel-
low at the Penn Center for the
Integration of Genetic Health-
care Technologies at the Univer-
sityh of Pennsylvania, where she
is studying how ultra-Orthodox
women make decisions on prena-
tal genetic tests.

To order online: www.ucpress.edu/9780520259645
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Birthing a Mother
The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self
Elly Teman
“Birthing a Mother is brilliant and beautifully written. It showcas-
es 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 profes-
sionals 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
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 moth-
ers 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.
Elly Teman is a Research Fellow at the Penn Center for the
Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies at the University
of Pennsylvania.
368 pages, 6 x 9”, 11 b/w photographs, 1 line illustration
$55.00 cloth 978-0-520-25963-8
$21.95 paper 978-0-520-25964-5