Abstract
Birthing a Mother is a beautifully and carefully written ethnographic analysis of the intimate emotional experiences of women who elect to provide the gift of maternity to those who are unable to bear a child. The informants who share their experiences are Israeli women who have decided to undertake a surrogate pregnancy, and their first-hand accounts of how they anticipated, managed, confronted, and rebuffed the inevitably complicated medical and legal dynamics of their experience make up the focus of this book. In order to control for the variable impact that culture, institutional, and social difference can bring to the surrogacy process, the author, a medical anthropologist, elected for several reasons to focus on the particular experiences of Israeli women. First, surrogacy is legal in Israel and surrogacy contracts are legal in its courts. Unlike arrangements in the leading surrogacy centers of California—which extol technology over nature and minimize state intervention in private reproductive lives, and the United Kingdom, where state regulations deter surrogacy from becoming a commercial venture and where surrogacy contracts are not enforceable—Israeli law actively permits compensated surrogacy but also tightly regulates every aspect of the process. Second, both the Jewish religion and Israeli national discourse amplify and clarify the very concepts being negotiated in surrogacy arrangements—maternity, kin relations, and bodies and boundaries, both personal and national. As a case study, Israel also introduces religion into the mix, further complicating how cultures employ beliefs about nature to maintain the social order associated with gender and race and to manage the relationship of technology to nature. Third, the relatively small size of Israel provided easy access to both parties of the dyad, the surrogate and the intended mother, and it also offered ready access to women who, unlike those in other locations, are allowed by national law to overtly pursue surrogacy strictly for financial gain. Thus, informants’ commonly stated motivations for surrogacy such as love of pregnancy, empathy for childless couples, and the desire to make a unique contribution were combined with rational economic goals of paying off loans, providing for their own children’s basic needs, and saving for the future.
The analysis of these women’s experience is organized into four parts: “Dividing” focuses on the ways in which surrogates demarcate the parts of their bodies they wish to retain for themselves throughout the process and those they wish to distance from and/or share with the intended mother. These demarcations form a “body map” that serves as a template for the emotion work associated with nurturing the fetus and relating to the intended couple, and as self-constructed guidelines body maps establish symbolic boundaries that translate into actions the surrogates rely upon throughout the pregnancy to preserve integrity of self. Often, mapping entailed bright lines that could shift, sometimes in contradictory ways, but it afforded these women control over their on-loan bodies and thus transcendence over the pregnancy.
“Connecting” addresses the activities of intended mothers as they moved away from their prior inability to be a mother and embarked on initially tentative steps in the process of preparing themselves for motherhood. These steps included naturalizing the embryos, actively seeking out knowledge about pregnancy and fetal development, and participating in prenatal care. These abstract claiming practices by intended mothers generated a privileged knowledge of the fetus that often encroached upon and complicated the contracted work of the surrogates. Inevitably, though, the pregnant body and the pregnancy itself became conjoined between surrogate and intended mothers through physical, psychological, and cultural activities and practices that redefined the pregnancy-by-proxy as one that embodied for the intended mother a gestational environment that replaced the surrogate.
“Separating” addresses the post-birth period—the strictly prescribed Israeli state-directed intervention that seals off the surrogate from the intended mother’s new maternity and process of parental claiming. These rational, institutional practices that are designed to assure severance of all ties between the surrogate and the fetus and the intended mother stand in stark contrast to the preceding physical and emotional intertwining between the women, and are examined through the contrasting lenses of the intended’s viewpoint of contractual exchange and the surrogate’s of gifting. Here, for the first time, the intended mother now defines the terms of the relationship, a shift in power and control that can leave the surrogate feeling like a commodity and her contribution to Israeli nation-state building marginalized.
“Redefining” describes how despite the ultimately alienating and disempowering experience of the final stage of surrogacy, it is transformed into one characterized by surrogates as the most meaningful experience of their lives. This takes place through the surrogate’s portrayal of herself as a courageous heroine who through sheer physical strength and emotional fortitude is able to successfully challenge doctors’ authoritative medical knowledge and endure extreme discomfort from the preparation for and undertaking of embryo transfers. This prowess is characterized, the author argues, in masculinized terms of mastery of the body over medical technology that are consistent with Israeli national culture.
This thoughtfully researched book sheds richly detailed substantive light upon and understanding of the social and emotional experience of the technical and technological aspects of surrogacy within a unique cultural context primarily from the vantage point of the surrogate and secondarily from that the intended mother. But as a particular case study this book goes well beyond descriptive focus to clarify the profound impact that national cultures, legal structures, and religious ideologies can have upon the surrogate experience, especially when women explicitly enter into symbolic relations with the state through their roles as wives and mothers. The research offered here raises provocative questions about the extent to which reproductive technologies are postmodern challenges of modernist notions of the nuclear family and motherhood, the presumption that medical technologies are moving us closer to the end of the body, that new technologies usurp nature as we know it and lead to a type of postmodern procreation, and whether state control of reproduction upends women’s and children’s interests. At the core of this research is a deep human emotion in an unexpected place: the surrogates’ greater sense of loss over dissolution of companionship with the intended mother than that from relinquishing the child she carried.