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To cite this article: Katharine Dow (2012) The Surrogate Body and the Body Politic, Science as
Culture, 21:3, 399-403, DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2011.630725
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2011.630725
Science as Culture
Vol. 21, No. 3, 399 403, September 2012
REVIEW
Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self, by Elly Teman,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, 361 pp., 14.95.
To what extent do practices of assisted conception reflect, or even encapsulate, the
social, moral and political contexts in which they take place? Historically, social
scientists have approached the natural sciences by critically reflecting on the
culture of science, as well as examining the ways in which science and
technology are implicated in the reproduction of culture.
Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have proved a fecund source of interest for social scientists because the ways that clinicians, patients, policy makers
and laypeople respond to them illuminate some of our most deep-seated ideas,
both about the way people are made and how they are related to one another.
Given this, it is somewhat frustrating that so many (often incredibly theoretically
stimulating) ethnographies of assisted conception have relatively little to say
about the everyday social worlds of those accessing these technologies. Yet
these matter for an anthropology of ART.
Typically, ethnographies of ART cast considerable light on the medical regimens that people using these treatments undergo and how this affects the way
they think about their (in)fertility, parenthood and kinship to their child and
other family members, yet many of the most everyday aspects of these peoples
lives remains in the background. Now that social scientists have been writing
about ART for over two decades, this tendency towards sidelining everyday life
in ethnographies of ART needs to be addressed. If the context in which these
Correspondence Address: Katharine Dow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15A George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK. Email: katieldow@gmail.com
0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/12/030399-5 # 2012 Katharine Dow
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2011.630725
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K. Dow
treatments are experienced remains implicit, ethnographers risk taking too much
for granted and miss ripe opportunities to capture the everyday experience of those
undertaking infertility treatments first-hand. This is particularly unfortunate given
that the majority of the places in which these accounts of ART have been written
are in the Western world, a region that has been historically under-represented in
the ethnographic record. Ethnography is an ideal tool to capture the minutiae of
everyday life and anthropologists are well placed to study ART because of our
focus on the small-scale and the level of access we typically have to research
participants. If we do not fully engage with the cultural, political and economic
milieu in which clinicians and patients operate, this can, ironically, serve to
reinforce the assumption that the clinic is a supra-cultural space.
Elly Teman has produced a compelling and detailed account of gestational surrogacy arrangements in contemporary Israel, based on many years of ethnographic
fieldwork amongst the surrogacy community there. Her book, Birthing a Mother,
focuses on the relationship between the women in surrogacy arrangements, in a
country in which commercial surrogacy is legal but closely regulated by the
state. Teman provides a sensitive analysis of how surrogates conceptualise and
map their own bodies, temporarily dividing off their pregnant bellies and
attributing foreign emotions to the developing foetus and its true parents. One
particularly telling example of this is a vignette in which a surrogate mother of
Iraqi descent describes craving a particular soup while pregnant, which is associated with the region of Morocco from which the intended mother originates. For
the surrogate, the craving she experiences is a sign, not of her connection to the
foetus inside her, but of its pre-existing, racialised kinship with the intended
parents.
As this example of physical craving from Temans ethnography suggests, the
experience of surrogacy can be one in which women experience their bodily
boundaries becoming more permeable than individualist medical discourse
would usually allow. Teman employs the term the shifting body to describe
how, through the gestation period, the pregnancy is gradually transferred from
the surrogate to the intended mother. For example, many intended mothers have
bodily experiences akin to pseudocyesis (phantom pregnancy), while surrogates
commonly contrasted their surrogate pregnancies with those with their own children by remarking upon the fact that they lost their pregnancy weight especially
quickly or that they had failed to lactate. This gestational osmosiswhere not
only the child, but also the pregnancy, is transferred from the surrogate to the
intending motherallows for intended mothers to gradually consolidate their
own identities as the only mothers of the children who are born through these
arrangements. Israeli surrogates report that they do not suffer significant feelings
of loss or trauma upon relinquishing the child to the intended parents,1 since this
act is experienced as the wonderful climax of the process of helping a woman to
become a mother rather than a sacrifice. For the surrogates, the close relationships
they build with the intended mothers are of primary importance, and problems
arise when this bond is not honoured rather than because of doubts about relinquishing the child.
The positive experiences that Israeli surrogate mothers commonly report is in
no small part due to the extent to which this contentious practice has been normalised in line with wider state agendas of encouraging families to have children (pronatalism). Israeli surrogacy law, which is extremely favourable towards intended
parents, stipulates that only women who have already had children but who are
unmarried can act as surrogate mothers. While Teman goes to some pains to
show the shifting power dynamics within surrogacy arrangements and the
complex agency of surrogates, she does not shy away from the fact that, as
single mothers, Israeli surrogates already occupy a marginal space. The Israeli
state not only circumscribes who can take part in surrogacy arrangements in
line with traditional ideas about what makes a family, but, as Teman argues,
also sets itself up as the ultimate source of the child. This is seen most forcefully
at the childs birth, where it enters the custody of the state welfare officer until its
intended parents secure a parental order. Israeli surrogates thus perceive that they
are doing something valuable for the state and, in a particularly strong section
towards the end of the ethnography, Teman analyses surrogates sense of their
own heroism in helping the intended parents. She is precise and convincing in
showing how, in describing themselves facing this physical test, surrogates use
military analogies that allow them to claim a masculine mastery over their
bodies in the service of the state as personified by the intended parents.
Teman makes a strong case for why surrogacy in Israel is especially interesting, linking it explicitly with the states pronatalist national ideologies and
demographic policies (p. 6). Yet, in the following sentence, she seems to contradict this point by arguing that, Examining how surrogates and intended
mothers negotiate maternity, kin relations, bodies, and boundaries in a context
where these stakes are so high amplifies what we might find among surrogacy
participants in other cultural contexts (p. 6, my emphasis). No doubt, there
are continuities between surrogacy as practised in Israel and elsewhere, and
Teman makes careful comparisons of her data with that from the US and UK.
Yet, in searching for these continuities, she occasionally loses sight of the particularities of the Israeli case, so that it is sometimes difficult to get a clear
picture of how the very specific political discourse of Israel translates into the
everyday experience of the surrogate mothers and intended parents in her
ethnography.
The specifics of the Israeli context are more apparent in Michal Nahmans work
on ova donation. She argues that idealized national bodies and particular racializations are brought into being by discourses, exchanges and extractions of human
ova. Here, scientific and national agendas co-produce one another (2006, p. 200).
Most of the Jewish Israelis undertaking donor conception that Nahman spoke to
agreed that non-Jewish Israelis would not make suitable donors, albeit for
complex and not necessarily straightforwardly racist reasons (2006, p. 206), and
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K. Dow
US or UK looks like, we will only ever give a partial and abstracted picture of
what it means, and takes, to produce a child in these places.
Note
1
While additional evidence of this lack of emotional trauma following surrogacy is scant, longitudinal research on surrogacy in the UK seems to support Temans contention (see Jadva et al.,
2003; Golombok et al., 2006).
References
Golombok, S., MacCallum, F., Murray, C., Lycett, E. and Jadva, V. (2006) Surrogacy families: parental functioning, parent child relationships and childrens psychological development at age
2, Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 47(2), pp. 213222.
Jadva, V., Murray, C., Lycett, E., MacCallum, F. and Golombok, S. (2003) Surrogacy: the experiences of surrogate mothers, Human Reproduction, 18(10), pp. 21962204.
Nahman, M. (2006) Materializing Israeliness: difference and mixture in transnational ova donation,
Science as Culture, 15(3), pp. 199213.