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  • From Surrogacy to Abortion and All that Lies Between Them
  • Omi Leissner (bio)
Birthing a mother: The surrogate body and the pregnant self, by Elly Teman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

We got control over reproduction that is controlled by “a man or The Man,” an individual man or the doctors or the government. . . . Virtually every ounce of control that women won out of this legislation has gone directly into the hands of men—husbands, doctors, or fathers—or is now in the process of attempts to reclaim it through regulation.

catharine mackinnon (1987, 100–101)

1. Introduction

Among all my mother’s daughters, only I have inherited her ability to break open an apple with her hands. Be that a function of nature or nurture, when I [End Page 133] first picked up Birthing a Mother I knew I had to call upon a similar skill: I tried to imagine myself prying open my mind in order to let in a view of surrogacy other than the typical radical feminist one I pride myself on holding, particularly with reference to reproductive technologies.1

Author Elly Teman is clearly aware of such views. On the very first page of Birthing a Mother, she sums up the nature of most academic scholarship on surrogacy, noting that it has “raised concerns about the commodification of women and children, class and gender-based exploitation of women’s bodies, the distortion of nature, and the devaluing of human life and of women’s reproductive labor.” The “sense of uneasiness” regarding surrogacy, she asserts, is also evident in popular accounts of the practice and in media coverage: these are rife with stereotypes of wealthy women lightheartedly “renting” poor women’s wombs in order to preserve their own figures (Teman 2010, 1–3). As for surrogates themselves, their very agreement to relinquish the babies they carry pits them as the threatening under-side of the notion of the “good mother.” Such “unnatural” behavior entitles them, apparently, to a host of derogatory, demeaning, and at the very least condescending adjectives, ranging from poor and desperate to greedy, emotionally unstable, or pathologically altruistic (3). In addition, entrenched societal beliefs regarding “bonding” engender the assumption that to relinquish a baby is necessarily traumatic for the surrogate mother, or, alternatively, that she is not to be trusted to carry out her obligations. In practice, it appears that such problems arise in less than 1 percent of cases. And it is upon this backdrop of public uneasiness, stereotypes and misinformation, declares Teman,

that the work of the anthropologist is needed to think against the grain of what we believe ought to be true. . . . I take a fresh look at surrogacy and attempt to completely rethink what we know about this reproductive practice by taking the experiences of persons immediately involved in it at face value and trying to understand what surrogacy means for them, in their own words.

(3)

The result of Teman’s efforts is Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self, hailed as the first ethnography to explore the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood (3). Specifically, the book is about the special relationship that develops between the two women involved in the process as practiced in Israel, although the implications of these findings might reach far beyond individual bodily and specific geographical boundaries.

In this article I begin with a discussion of Israeli legal regulations of surrogacy. I then discuss Teman’s findings and conclusions, and go on to question [End Page 134] and analyze these, using as my benchmark a well-known Israeli abortion case (the Plonit decision) as well as its critique, undertaken with the help of Catharine MacKinnon’s concept of “Privacy v. Equality” and Donna Haraway’s “virtual speculum.” Ultimately, I raise doubts whether Israel’s surrogacy law and practices are as “positive” for Israeli women as Teman asserts. Finally, I ask whether Israel’s methods can realistically be applied elsewhere, and end with my own summary and conclusions.2

2. Israel’s surrogacy law

Birthing a Mother focuses on the relationship that develops between the two women involved in surrogacy. Israel is an ideal location for such research. First...

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