Zsuzsa Berend

• Ph. D.
• Administrator at University of California, Los Angeles

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...

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...

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...

This paper is a partial transcription of a long conversation between the sociologist Zsuzsa Berend (University of California, Los Angeles) and the anthropologist Corinna Sabrina Guerzoni (Western Fertility Institute, Los Angeles) on US surrogacy. It is the outcome of an interview occurred on 6th October 2017 in Los Angeles, transcribed and revised...

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...

In this article, I explore surrogates' rich, diverse, and collective negotiations of relatedness and relationships on the largest U.S. surrogacy support website. Surrogates reconfigure existing kinship understandings and maintain that intent and love are firmer bases of parenthood than biogenetic connection. Increasing use of donor gametes contribu...

This Commentary takes up two of the main findings by Imrie and Jadva's study, namely surrogates' satisfaction with the post-surrogacy contact with intended parents and their motivation for surrogacy. It argues that the findings are in keeping with other qualitative research on surrogacy and that this similarity is not the result of the similarity o...

This article seeks to demonstrate and analyze the cultural and emotional work surrogate mothers collectively engage in on the largest surrogacy support website, http://www.surromomsonline.com. Surrogate mothers' online stories and discussions frame contract surrogacy as a "labor of love." Women often describe their surrogacy as a "journey" of share...

I explore surrogate mothers' narrative construction of pregnancy loss on surrogacy support websites. Communicating via the Internet, women construct the public online world of surrogacy. Drawing on anthropological and sociological literature I investigate the connections between conceptualizations of loss and understandings of technological practic...

Abstract The article explores the nature and symbolism of money within familial relationships and the effect of close personal ties on money use in the example of the Alcott family. The historical moment is interesting precisely because many of the oppositions between money and sentiment, intimate and financial bonds were newly formulated in the 19...

The article explores the seemingly paradoxical connection between the idealization of love and marriage and the reluctance of many women to marry in nineteenth-century New England. Arguing against interpretations that view nineteenth-century singlehood as a proto-feminist stance, it situates spinsterhood in the context of the Victorian elevation an...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1994. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-201). Department: Sociology.