Elly Teman

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Verified

Elly verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Ruppin Academic Center

This article presents a critical appraisal of the psychosocial empirical research on surrogate mothers, their motivations for entering into surrogacy agreements and the outcome of their participation. I apply a social constructionist approach toward analyzing the scholarship, arguing that the cultural assumption that "normal" women do not voluntari...

Research has suggested that religion and spirituality may inform individuals' interpretation of and responses to uncertainty during pregnancy including the possibility of genetic disorders. In this study, 25 qualitative interviews were undertaken with ultra-Orthodox [Haredi] Jewish women about their experiences with uncertainties related to pregnan...

Studies on reproductive technologies often examine women's reproductive lives in terms of choice and control. Drawing on 48 accounts of procreative experiences of religiously devout Jewish women in Israel and the US, we examine their attitudes, understandings and experiences of pregnancy, reproductive technologies and prenatal testing. We suggest t...

Our new graphic novel "A Tale of Two Surrogates: A Graphic Narrative of Assisted Reproduction" is available for pre-order on Amazon. Please check it out and let us know your thoughts! Here's the link to pre-order: https://www.amazon.com/Tale-Two-Surrogates-Narrative-Reproduction/dp/0271098856 We also have set up a website with more info on the...

A Tale of Two Surrogates explores the complicated emotional, medical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding assisted reproduction. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research conducted by a sociologist and an anthropologist, this book presents, in an accessible graphic novel format, the intertwined stories of two fictional women who decide...

From early writings of our oldest religious traditions through recent controversies surrounding the Hobby Lobby case and the ever-divisive question of abortion, questions of reproduction raise some of the most difficult and fascinating issues in bioethics. Much has been written on broader bioethical perspectives on reproductive issues, but it is eq...

Drawing on ethnographic research in the United States and Israel, two countries that have long-term experience with surrogacy, we compare surrogates’ understanding of, approaches to, and expectations about regulation. Women who become surrogates in these two countries hold opposite views about regulation. US surrogates formulate their rejection of...

Anthropological scholarship frames pregnancy as an out of ordinary embodied event, rarely focusing on mothers of more than four children. We interviewed 49 ultra-orthodox Jewish [Haredi] women in Israel and the US who birthed up to 16 children. We suggest that Haredi women are acculturated to the routines of pregnancy, childbirth, and a habitual po...

What are best practices in surrogacy and what are unsustainable ones? Comparing our long-term ethnographic studies of gestational surrogacy in Israel and in the United States, we analytically explore practices and outcomes we have found to be unsustainable in surrogacy agreements. We then outline three key finding that explain better outcomes for b...

This paper explores how surrogates negotiate the meaning of familial belonging and family identity when they discuss surrogacy with their husband, children, and other relatives. We suggest that surrogacy necessitates reflexive explication of what a family is and how this family is implicated in surrogacy. Our comparative study analyzes ethnographic...

Why do Jewish inmates in Israeli prisons embrace religion? What initially motivates them to participate in prayers during incarceration and what are their motivations to make a deeper commitment to observe orthodox Judaism while in prison? We conducted 30 qualitative interviews with 29 Jewish–Israeli men who underwent a process of “religious invigo...

This article contributes to the anthropology of morality through an ethnographic focus on the consultations of religiously observant Jews with rabbis and medical specialists regarding dilemmas surrounding prenatal diagnosis of fetal anomalies. Our ethnography looks at religious couples who consult rabbinic authorities on their reproductive dilemmas...

Analyzing interviews with 20 Jewish-Israeli gestational surrogates who gave birth in 2014–2016, I examine the common narrative structure of their personal stories and the way that this becomes what Adichie calls a “single story”. This idealized, romanticized, utopian story includes: 1. an intimate bond between surrogate and intended parents; 2. an...

In this chapter, I compare qualitative research, primarily from ethnographic studies of surrogacy in two countries where it is regulated and practiced differently: Israel and India. My aim is to contribute to surrogacy-related policy discussions by comparatively analysing empirical work by sociologists and anthropologists on transnational Indian su...

Drawing on a comparison of two ethnographic research projects on surrogacy in the United States and Israel, this paper explores surrogates' views about motherhood and parenthood, relationships and relatedness. The paper challenges three myths of surrogacy: that surrogates bond with the babies they carry for intended parents, that it is immoral not...

"What is the nature and impact of faith and religion in prison? This book summarizes contemporary and cutting-edge research on religion in correctional contexts, enabling a scientific understanding of how prisoners use faith in their everyday lives. Religion long has been a tool for correctional treatment. In the United States, religion was the pri...

This article explores the way that surrogacy and normal pregnancy share cultural assumptions about pregnancy. Through a juxtaposition of our ethnographic studies of two groups of Jewish-Israeli women-women who have undergone "normal," low-risk pregnancies and women who have given birth as gestational surrogates-we argue that surrogacy and pregnancy...

Can participation in a religious rehabilitation program benefit a released prisoner’s reentry into the community, and if so, how? Which elements of the religious worldview can be translated into tools for promoting desistance? Using a qualitative approach, we conducted 30 interviews with released prisoners from 3 months to 5 years beyond release wh...

This article presents an anthropological critique of the Israeli surrogacy law and of the practices of the surrogacy contract approvals committee as a mechanism of symbolic control.

This entry describes women's experiences of pregnancy across cultures. In every sociocultural—and political—setting, women's pregnancies are managed and regulated in accordance with local, regional, and national knowledge systems and beliefs about women's and men's roles in creating health and illness throughout gestation, childbirth, and the nurtu...

When a particular practice—in this case, surrogate motherhood—troubles so many scholars from other disciplines, anthropologists provide insights from previously underexplored perspectives. Without making value judgments, we try to look at the ways people involved in the practice give meanings to their actions. We try to understand the cultural perc...

This article addresses the medicalization of pregnancy in Israel and itseffects on the experiences of Jewish-Israeli men who participated in various stages of their female partners’ prenatal care. The highly medicalized arena of Israeli prenatal care, with its strong emphasis on prenatal diagnostic testing, provided the context in which the men’s a...

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 cros...

The surrogate portrays herself as a mythic heroine who endures hardships on an arduous quest or journey according to a narrative structure that Frank terms “automythology”—a mythical tale of self-reinvention, of not just having survived the quest but of having been reborn. The surrogate's journey does not make her someone else; instead, it takes he...

This concluding chapter offers a more in-depth discussion of the links between the women's narrated experiences and Israeli nationalism, Jewish religion, and the type of civic maternalism particular to Jewish-Israeli culture. It then looks at the ways the ethnography reflects on some of the main theoretical concerns surrounding surrogacy and on the...

This chapter looks at the experiences of intended mothers during the surrogacy process, with a particular focus on their “parental claiming practices.” This concept refers to the strategies used by those preparing themselves to adopt as they wait for that fateful phone call notifying them that they have become parents. Unlike adoptive mothers, inte...

This chapter explores how the body map aids surrogates in their attempts to distance themselves from the fetus and protect themselves from being “suffocated” by the contracting couple. The operationalization of this “mapping” serves as a crucial tool in helping the surrogate manage within the limiting structure of the surrogacy contract. The body m...

The intended mother's experience of surrogacy cannot be separated from her relationship with the surrogate. Surrogates play a central role in fostering the intended mother's goals, whether by allowing her to assume control of the medical aspects of the pregnancy or by actively trying to bond her to the baby. The story behind the surrogacy agreement...

This chapter explores the surrogate's experience of the postpartum period, including her reaction to separation from the intended mother and her expectations related to the reciprocation of her efforts in gifting terms. It examines degrees of acknowledgment of the surrogate's gift in the actions of intended mothers and suggests that the degree of a...

This chapter looks at the return of state intervention in the immediate aftermath of the birth and at the rites of categorization undertaken by hospital staff during that period. The directed separation that occurs accords, for the most part, with the intended mother's desire to seal off her new identity from her surrogate and to incorporate it as...

This chapter explores the surrogate's reframing of the challenges of surrogacy as an endurance test. The institutional management of surrogacy until the contract is approved by the state may be likened to a test; prospective surrogates undergo comprehensive institutional screening that is consistent across all cases. The surrogacy law specifies str...

This ethnography probes the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. The book 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, the book traces the...

Surrogate motherhod is an anomaly that that disrupts familiar conceptions of motherhood, kinship and family. How do surrogates and intended mothers accommodate and resist the anomalous connotations of this reproductive strategy’ How do they assess and negotiate their own positions in Israeli society through surrogacy‘ I will argue that throughout t...

This essay addresses my perspective during the course of fieldwork on the topic of surrogate motherhood in Israel. In a surrogacy arrangement, a woman is contracted to bear a child for a couple to whom she will relinquish the child, usually in exchange for monetary reimbursement. Gestational surrogacy – the variant that I studied – refers to a spec...

This article examines pregnancy as a dyadic body-project within surrogate motherhood arrangements. In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the surrogate mother agrees to have an embryo that has been created using IVF, with the genetic materials of the intended parents or of anonymous donors, surgically implanted in her womb. Based on anthropological...

This article addresses the medicalization of pregnancy in Israel and its effects on the experiences of Jewish-Israeli men who participated in various stages of their female partners' prenatal care. The highly medicalized arena of Israeli prenatal care, with its strong emphasis on prenatal diagnostic testing, provided the context in which the men's...

This chapter discusses the Jewish folk symbol of the red string in the Hebrew Bible. Beyond the general ‘projective folkloristic’ qualities of the red string, one can only account for its contemporary popularity in Jewish Israeli society by tying the practice to historic Jewish traditions and biblical images that might be beyond the awareness of pa...

This book proposes that the idea of ‘Jewish’, or what people think of as ‘Jewishness’, is revealed in expressions of culture and applied in constructions of identity and representation. Part I considers how the kabbalistic red string found at sites throughout Israel conveys a political and psychological response to terrorism. It examines Jewish and...

This article discusses how the dominant approach to life and death as binary structures in American society influences the social construction of the self. Through the analysis of the television series Six Feet Under, we identify two types of selves: a "life-self" and a "death-self." Questioning this binary, we offer the concept of "transitory move...

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 2.3 (2006) 114-115 Israel's Surrogate Mother Agreements Act of 1996 is the most comprehensive, detailed legislation on the regulation of surrogacy contracts in the world. While many other countries have banned surrogacy, Israel is the only country where surrogacy is legal, remunerated, and government-supervise...

In this article, I draw on anthropological and feminist scholarship on the body and the nature/culture divide as a framework for understanding the place of surrogate mothers in a conceptual ideology that connects motherhood with nature. I explore links between the medicalization of childbirth in Israel and the personal agency of surrogate mothers a...