Surrogacy as a Family Project: How Surrogates Articulate Familial Identity and Belonging

Abstract

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 data on Israeli and US surrogates to illuminate key similarities in surrogates’ strategies vis-a-vis their husband and children, pointing to the importance of daily family practices in how people understand family belonging. First, we map out the ways surrogates engage their husbands in order to gain their support and protect their nuclear family unit before entering the process. Next, we look at how surrogates explain surrogacy to their children in efforts to clarify siblingship and the boundaries between the two families, and to make surrogacy into an educational family project. We analyze the metaphors and rituals in surrogates’ family-bounding practices.

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https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X20944527
Journal of Family Issues
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Original Articles
Surrogacy as a Family
Project: How Surrogates
Articulate Familial
Identity and Belonging
Elly Teman1 and Zsuzsa Berend2
Abstract
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 data on Israeli
and US surrogates to illuminate key similarities in surrogates’ strategies vis-
a-vis their husband and children, pointing to the importance of daily family
practices in how people understand family belonging. First, we map out
the ways surrogates engage their husbands in order to gain their support
and protect their nuclear family unit before entering the process. Next,
we look at how surrogates explain surrogacy to their children in efforts to
clarify siblingship and the boundaries between the two families, and to make
surrogacy into an educational family project. We analyze the metaphors and
rituals in surrogates’ family-bounding practices.
Keywords
Surrogacy, surrogate mothers, familial belonging, family identity, children of
surrogates
1Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ruppin Academic Center, Emek Hefer, Israel
2Department of Sociology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Elly Teman, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ruppin Academic Center, Emek Hefer,
4025000, Israel.
Email: mslula@gmail.com
944527JFIXXX10.1177/0192513X20944527Journal of Family IssuesTeman and Berend
research-article2020

2 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
Introduction
Critics of surrogacy have often focused on how the practice leads to the com-
modification of babies and motherhood and the deconstruction of the family
(Anderson, 1990; Danna, 2015; Dolgin, 1990, 2019; Rothman, 2000). Others,
especially early champions of surrogacy, anticipated that the practice would
deconstruct “the patriarchal” nuclear family (e.g., Firestone 2003).
Empirically, neither scenario has materialized. Our respective research proj-
ects on Israel and the United States explored surrogates’ conceptualizations
of “family” and found that they delineated boundaries between their own
families and the family they “helped” create.
Our concern here is how surrogates, as part of their nuclear as well as
larger family, negotiate the meaning of familial belonging and 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 illu-
minates key similarities in surrogates’ strategies vis-a-vis their husband and
children, pointing to the importance of daily family practices in how people
understand family belonging.
Literature Review
Our exploration of surrogate’s negotiations with their husband and children
draws upon the broader sociological and anthropological scholarship on
family, family identity, and belonging. While it is beyond the reach of this
article to account for the breadth of this scholarship, much of the scholar-
ship on family identity and belonging is formulated in the context of the
deinstitutionalization of family (Cherlin, 2004). The pre-eminence of the
nuclear family based on companionate marriage has been the main charac-
teristic of modern family life (Finch and Summerfield, 1991; Stacey, 1996).
Accordingly, “family belonging” has been conceptualized as a relationship
of solidarity (Schneider, 1980, p. 52). Schneider (1980, p. 50) also con-
tended that the family is the paradigm of “how kinship relations are to be
conducted and to what end,” and that living in the same household gives
meaning to biogenetic relatedness. The home is the main site of family
practices, including couple relations, both in practical and imagined ways
(Gabb & Fink, 2015).
“Family identity,” defined as “the family’s subjective sense of its own
continuity over time, its present situation, and its character” (Bennett et al.,
1988, pp. 212), is a useful concept to comprehend how families distinguish
themselves from others. It is, however, important to think of family identity

Teman and Berend 3
in a dynamic way, as practices (Morgan, 1999, 2011; Silva and Smart, 1999).
“Doing family” implies reflexive practices and an “active process” (Morgan,
1999, p. 16). “Family practices exist in the routine talk about family—family
obligations, family duties, family constraints. . . . Family talk is family
action, re-affirming or modifying the entity under discussion” (Morgan,
1999, p. 29).
Important recent work has explored family practices in the context of
reproductive technologies and adoption (e.g., Howell, 2006; Nordqvist and
Smart, 2014). The focus of this scholarship, however, is more often on the
“receiving” family, that is, the family that is created through adoption or
donor gametes. There has been little empirical work on how surrogates’ fami-
lies make sense of carrying a child for others in comparison to how adoptive
parents (e.g., Anagnost, 2000; Howell, 2006; Howell and Melhuus, 2007), or
those using donor eggs or sperm (Nordqvist and Smart 2014) or embryo
donation (Collard & Kashmeri, 2011), negotiate family belonging, discuss
siblinghood and family identity, and decide issues of secrecy versus
disclosure.
The scholarship documents that parents of donor-conceived and adopted
children employ various strategies, rituals, and narratives to make these chil-
dren “their own”, to construct a sense of family identity and manage this
familial identity as their children grow (Howell & Melhuus, 2007). The proj-
ect of “kinning” transnationally adopted children in order to create familial
and societal belonging without erasing the child’s original “cultural identity”
is a prominent research agenda (Anagnost, 2000; Howell, 2006; Howell &
Marre, 2006). Suter et al.’s (2008) study on negotiating lesbian family iden-
tity through family rituals and symbols is instructive; they contend that given
the fragility of their family identities, lesbian mothers draw upon symbols
and rituals that will communicate and publicly validate their long-term, per-
manent relationship and will affirm their family identity to relatives, co-
workers, and strangers. Surrogates similarly draw on symbolic manifestations
of family belonging and identity when their surrogate pregnancy raises ques-
tions from their children and others.
Critics of surrogacy have largely focused on how surrogates are denied
motherhood, without attention to either surrogates’ understandings of relat-
edness or acknowledgment of surrogates’ own family situation (Danna, 2015;
Rothman, 2000). Some legal scholars worry about the small handful of legal
cases that “shift the contours of family. . .and the parent-child bond” (Dolgin,
2019, p. 503). Empirical sociological scholarship on surrogacy, in contrast,
has situated surrogates in their familial context and examined some aspects of
surrogates’ understandings of kin-ties and parenthood (e.g., Berend, 2016;
Teman, 2010; Jacobson, 2016; Ragoné 1994; Ziff, 2017, 2019). Findings

4 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
have consistently shown that surrogates considered intended parents’ (IPs)
desire for children as the basis of parental claims and explained that they
would not have been pregnant but for the IPs’ intention to create a family
(Berend, 2016; Teman, 2010; Jacobson, 2016; Ragoné, 1994; Ziff, 2017).
Some research has also explored surrogates’ understanding of sibling-
hood and found that they overwhelmingly understood co-residence and car-
ing behavior, rather than simply genetics, as markers of family belonging
(Berend, 2016). Jadva & Imrie (2014) found that in the United Kingdom,
IPs’ intentions were central to the construction of parenthood, and surro-
gates’ children struggled to find the “right” terminology to define their rela-
tionship to the surrogacy-born child. Our aim is to focus on a less discussed
area in the scholarship: on surrogacy as a “family project.” By family project
we mean that surrogates undertake surrogacy as a joint endeavor with their
husband and children, first convincing them and then involving them in its
various phases, and relying on their support and cooperation. Many aspects
of this nuclear family project are not visible to outsiders, sometimes not
even fully to the IPs, yet it is a key factor of surrogacy both in the United
States and Israel.
A Comparative Approach to Understanding
Surrogacy
Our comparison stems from discussions about our respective findings over
the years. Despite dramatic regulatory and political differences in the social
organization of surrogacy between the United States and Israel, we have
found many similarities between how surrogates themselves organize and
understand the practice, and what strategies they employ in defining family
boundaries. We take these similarities to be rooted in the Western sociocul-
tural understanding of family life, with the couple at its center. Similarly to
Inhorn et. al’s (2017) comparative study of medical egg freezing among
Israeli and US cancer patients, we find the binational ethnographic investiga-
tion of surrogates’ articulations of familial identity and belonging fruitful
because it sheds light on larger patterns of family practices and meanings. In
contrast to other socio-cultural contexts, surrogates in both our samples are
typically married with children, and embrace surrogacy as not just a family
project but also a positive social contribution. Israeli and US surrogates
undertake surrogacy while living at home, together with their families, unlike
Indian surrogates who are usually separated from their families during the
pregnancy, living in dormitories hosted by the surrogacy clinic (e.g., Pande,
2014; Rudrappa, 2015). Surrogates in the United States and Israel also

Teman and Berend 5
similarly conceptualize kin-ties, a topic we have comparatively explored
elsewhere (Teman and Berend, 2018). Specifically, they do not consider the
child their own and do not report “bonding” with the baby, unlike some of the
Indian surrogates who seem to consider the surrogate baby kin (Pande, 2014)
and some who grieved over relinquishing the child (Rudrappa, 2015). Israeli
and US surrogates also differ substantially from the Russian surrogates stud-
ied by Weis (2017), who viewed surrogacy primarily as a business transac-
tion as well as a social stigma, rather than a conjoined monetary and gift
relationship and a socially praiseworthy practice, as we have found to be the
case for Israel and the United States.
It is interesting to note that Israeli and US surrogates articulate similar
meanings about surrogacy and family in very different regulatory contexts.
Tightly monitored by the state under a comprehensive law, Israeli surrogacy
contracts must be pre-approved by a government-appointed committee. The
parties must be Israeli citizens, share the same religion, and cannot be related
to one another. At the time of this study, the IPs had to be married hetero-
sexual couples who have no or only one genetic offspring. The sperm had to
be provided by the intended father (IF) and the egg by the intended mother
(IM) or an anonymous donor Teman (2010).
Conversely, in the United States, surrogacy is regulated state-by-state
rather than by federal law; state regulation differs greatly. New York, for
example, has until recently considered surrogacy contracts void and unen-
forceable. In the most surrogacy-friendly state, California, courts generally
reinforce surrogacy contracts; however, there are no statutes regulating sur-
rogacy, and a free market model prevails in which private commercial sur-
rogacy agencies and fertility clinics operate with little oversight. States that
allow compensated surrogacy do not limit who can contract a surrogate nor
require mandatory contracts or screening; thus surrogates and IPs negotiate
the conditions of their arrangement through an agency, lawyers, or privately.
In this state-by-state regulatory situation, parties to surrogacy often find ways
to sidestep the hurdles presented by one state by drawing up contracts or
working with agencies or clinics in another, more surrogacy-friendly one.
In both countries, albeit in somewhat different ways, surrogates—now
most often married mothers—are active agents, negotiating the legal, medi-
cal, and relational aspects of surrogacy. Thus, surrogates negotiate both the
bureaucratic/public and the private processes of surrogacy, in stark contrast
to the Indian and Russian surrogates referenced earlier who are typically not
involved in contract negotiations and may never meet, let alone form a rela-
tionship, with the IPs. Our respective findings are a logical basis for the com-
parative exploration we are undertaking in this paper.

6 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
Context and Methods
While expanded upon elsewhere Berend (2016); Teman (2010), the follow-
ing is a brief outline of the methods for each of the studies, highlighting the
common ground of these studies as a basis for our comparative analysis. The
Israeli study included in-depth, open-format interviews, lasting about 1.5
hours, with 20 Jewish-Israeli surrogates who gave birth between 2014 and
2016. All interviewees were age 23– 38 years and lived within driving dis-
tance from the IPs. All surrogates were married, with two or more children.
This study was a follow-up to an earlier study on Israeli surrogates who gave
birth between 1998 and 2006; previous regulations allowed only single or
divorced women to become surrogates Teman (2010).
Part of the inspiration for this follow-up study was to expand upon the
ongoing comparative conversation between the two authors on the similari-
ties and differences between surrogates’ understanding of relationships and
relatedness in these two contexts Teman and Berend (2018). Thus, the inter-
view guide included questions about the surrogates’ negotiations with their
husbands and children.
The American study, conducted from 2002 to 2013, employed online eth-
nographic observation of www.surromomsonline.com (SMO), the largest
and most important mediated public surrogacy forum in the United States;
thousands of members discussed surrogacy-related questions and offered
advice to newcomers. It was complemented with email exchanges with 35
surrogates recruited from SMO. This study focused on the ongoing commu-
nications among surrogates, the issues they took up and revisited, the ones
they settled, and the changes in definitions about surrogacy-related emotions,
behaviors, and standards. For the purposes of this article, we selected discus-
sion threads about surrogacy-related conversations with family members.
It is important to point out that not all surrogates in the United States par-
ticipated in SMO discussions, yet for over a decade it was the “backbone of
the surrogacy world”, a treasure-trove of information and advice, as members
pointed out. SMO members were a mix of traditional and gestational surro-
gates—although more often the latter—from many different states across the
United States; mostly married, White, with two to four children.
While the challenges and benefits of comparing sets of different qualita-
tive data have been discussed by others (Seale et. al 2010), our data sets had
commonalities that were unique to the world of surrogacy. In the US sample,
immersion in SMO discussions offered a comprehensive understanding of
collectively defined meanings amongst surrogates, while the Israeli inter-
views yielded insights into the conversion of meanings and expectations for-
mulated through participation in these groups.

Teman and Berend 7
Both authors wanted to understand how surrogates themselves formulate
meanings. These meanings in turn inform surrogates’ actions and have con-
sequences for the practice of surrogacy. Both authors adopted the same inter-
pretive and analytic grounded theory approach to analyze data. First, each
author openly coded her data for emergent themes. Next, we each made lists
of recurring meta-themes in our data that related to the surrogate’s family.
Third, we organized our data into one combined document under headlines
such as “surrogate’s husband” and “explaining to children” so that we could
begin to identify commonalities and differences. Finally, we were able to
identify the theoretical framework of family identity and belonging.
Findings
Protecting the Nuclear Family Unit
Surrogacy, both in Israel and the United States, requires a strong commitment
from the surrogate’s nuclear family. The data from both countries show that
surrogates carefully consider their nuclear family’s interests before they
embark on a surrogacy “journey.” Husbands’ possible misgiving or concerns
were the first issues surrogates considered. One family could not and should
not help the other if there was any threat to the integrity of the first. We both
found that surrogates’ efforts of persuasion focused on their nuclear family.
Contrary to Ragone’s (1994) earlier argument about surrogacy empowering
women in the domestic sphere, we found that companionate marriage and
joint decision-making were characteristic in both settings; these findings are
consistent with more recent research results on surrogacy (Jacobson 2016;
Ziff 2019). This emphasis on joint decision-making is not particular to sur-
rogacy; other studies on contemporary families have found that communica-
tion is quite central to how couple relationships are conducted (Gabb and
Fink, 2015; Peters, 2000); mutuality and reciprocity are the cornerstones of
the “democratization of the interpersonal domain” (Giddens 1992:3) and
decision-making equality between spouses has increased (e.g., Hochschild
and Machung, 2012).
The idea for surrogacy was typically initiated by the surrogate, who then
approached her husband to make sure that he was willing to be supportive.
Israeli surrogate Maya explained that she had to gradually draw her husband
in, discussing his initial hesitation:
At first he was very against it, so for a whole year I explained it to him drop by
drop, I explained every little detail. He had a lot of concerns, also for himself.
He said, “I’m a man and I will have to support a pregnancy and a baby that is

8 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
not my own.” We processed it over that year and in the end he agreed and
understood. In the end he was very supportive and his commitment to this
whole thing was very important.
Husbands’ concerns focused less on their own role and more on physical and
emotional risks. Employing common metaphors we will discuss further,
Israeli surrogate Lea relayed:
My husband had reservations about. . .how I will deal with it emotionally. I
explained to him that I am a babysitter, an oven, he can call it whatever he
wants. I wanted to bring him to the stage that he could support me and not just
agree with my decision.
US surrogates also believed that their husband’s support was essential,
and expressed their hope that the husband would want to undertake surrogacy
as a partnership rather than simply agree to it. As in Israel, it often took a
while, sometimes even years, for SMO surrogates to convince their husbands.
Women advised one another not to rush this process and all recommended
talking it over in detail with their husband.
At first my dh [darling husband] was unsure. He said he had never entertained the
idea and therefore couldn’t give me a truthful answer until he learned more about
it. He was right there with me, doing research, reading, learning. As all things in
our marriage it was a joint decision, it affected his life as much as my own.
Lori’s characterization of joint decision-making was common among
SMO surrogates: “Marriage should be a partnership. . .we make decisions
TOGETHER.” In the few cases when a newbie complained that her husband
objected to surrogacy, but she still wanted to go ahead, fellow surrogates
were very critical. When a new SMO member reported that she had already
scheduled a doctor’s appointment despite her husband’s hesitation, she
received harsh responses like the one below from fellow surrogates:
Are you really going to do this without your husband’s support? You really
want to wreck your marriage and your children’s home for someone else? It
seems your IPs don’t care about you or the fact your pregnancy will be stressful
and your home destroyed. . .. OR the IPs haven’t been told that DH is not
supportive in which case they may choose not to work with you at this time if
they have any sense of decency.
Similarly, Israeli surrogate Maya noted how she and her husband considered
themselves a team in surrogacy:

Teman and Berend 9
It was as if we were on the same platform, we both understood that we are
going on some kind of shlichut (a word connoting being sent on a unique
mission either from G-d or for the nation or an organization that helps others),
some kind of cooperative act together.
Surrogacy as a joint undertaking sheds light on how couples negotiate
spousal involvement in one another’s work. Although none of the surrogates’
in our studies discussed surrogacy as market “work”, they were fully aware
that it requires considerable adjustments and sacrifices from husbands. While
even in post-industrial countries women’s lives are often structured by their
husband’s work requirements (Finch, 2012), our findings reveal the underly-
ing companionate logic of joint decision-making in this somewhat reversed
gender situation.
SMO surrogates noted that husband-involvement was a gradual process: it
was possible for a husband who opposed this “journey” to gradually become
a strong advocate of it, as Alice advised:
When I first told my hubbie I wanted to be a surro, he said, ‘Are you
nuts????!!!!!’ I left it at that, then approached him again and talked a little more
about it! I finally said, “If you don’t support me in this, I won’t do it! Helping
another family is not worth hurting mine!” Anyway, he came around and fully
supports me in this! In fact, he is proud of me and has even told some of his
friends at work! So, it is possible for your hubbie to come around gradually!
Just give him time.
SMO surrogates offered advice on strategies for getting husbands on board,
primarily by encouraging husbands to think of surrogacy as benefitting the
whole family and by creating empathy for a particular couple:
If you want him on your side, then show him the benefits to him and the rest of
your family. Your children are so young and they need a stay-at-home mom.
You can do this and still contribute to the household. Sometimes the husband is
not all for this journey until he meets a couple that he can relate to and want to
help. Make him feel that this is his journey too and that he plays a very vital
role. If he still balks and his reasoning is sound, then back off for a while. There
is always later.
Protecting the integrity of the surrogate’s own family and marriage came
first, and surrogacy was considered a joint undertaking. Interestingly, while
husbands’ support was essential, none of the women in either study were
willing to forego surrogacy because of the opinions of other family members
or friends. Many Israeli and SMO surrogates relayed that they had kept

10 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
surrogacy a secret from their parents and siblings until they were pregnant
with the surrogate baby; some only told their other relatives after the birth, if
at all. Yet surrogacy is not, on the whole, a “reproductive secret” (Smart,
2011). When it is kept from some relatives, secrecy is aimed to protect the
nuclear family from unnecessary tensions. These findings concur with other
studies on assisted conception, particularly Nordqvist and Smart (2014) who
found that in the case of donor conception by lesbian and heterosexual cou-
ples, the wider family, including the future grandparents, was usually held at
bay at least until pregnancy was achieved.
Surrogates were often not surprised by an initial lack of support from their
parents or in-laws, let alone from others. In both countries they seemed to
consider it from the outset that some family members would need convinc-
ing, but even if relatives never “came on board”, these women did not hesi-
tate to proceed. Israeli surrogate Hadar reported:
There are not many people in my inner circle that understand this desire, this
need to make a difference in the world for someone. [. . .] It was especially
hard for my grandmother. [. . .] My father is not an easy person. We told
him. . .and it was pretty uncomfortable.
Many surrogates in both countries acknowledged the lack of initial enthu-
siasm from parents, siblings, and in-laws, but none viewed it as critical, in
contrast to their husband’s support. Even women who reported good relation-
ships with parents and in-laws were clear on whose opinion mattered: “We’re
close with DH’s parents and mine, but I really don’t give a crap what anyone
other than DH thinks.” Surrogates thus articulated a family hierarchy, relegat-
ing other family members to a level of lesser importance and thus also indi-
cating lesser solidarity. As one SMO surrogate advised: “if that’s the worse
they do [i.e., oppose surrogacy], stand your ground and tell them you’ll just
have to agree to disagree, but you’re not living their life, you’re living yours.”
There was also agreement that friends’ opposition was a confirmation of their
incompatibility as friends. One surrogate summed up the general sentiment:
“The only opinion that matters to me is my husband’s :)”
When hesitant husbands eventually came on board, their support was cru-
cial to the women, although their levels of participation varied between sup-
porting from the sidelines and being an active partner in the process. Israeli
surrogate Gal, for instance, said her husband “was not part of the process
itself but he is part of me”, while Shir noted that her husband was so fully
involved that he accompanied her to every doctor’s checkup and every meet-
ing with the couple. SMO surrogates encouraged one another to involve their
husband in the every-day tasks of surrogacy: “He felt really included in the

Teman and Berend 11
whole process because he did my shots. He sent my IM e-mails all of the
time. He and I both tried to do this as a partnership.”
As husbands became more involved, they often bragged about their wife
to others, saying that only “special women” would be able to do that much for
others. Israeli surrogates similarly found that as their husbands became more
involved in surrogacy they expressed pride about this “joint project”. Hadas
noted:
At first I told him I wanted to be a surrogate and he said “no”. So I said, “when
I wanted to take in a foster kid you said no, when I wanted to adopt a lone
soldier you said no, now surrogacy you say no.” But when he finally said yes,
he was totally behind me and ready for anything.
After witnessing the emotional moment in the delivery room, Hadas’ hus-
band further solidified his commitment:
The powerful feeling in the delivery room after you give birth and you
understand that you. . .created a family, it was awesome. No children and now
they have a family because of you. In the delivery room my husband said
“wow. Now I am ready to do it again.”[. . .] After the baby was born he would
walk around with a photo of the baby and show it off like a proud uncle.
While surrogates’ stories often focus on their sense of individual agency and
closeness to the IM during the birth Berend, 2016; Teman, 2010, Hadas articu-
lates the importance of the event in her couple relationship as she and her hus-
band created a “shared couple memory” (Gabb and Fink, 2015) of birthing a
new family together. Together, our data reveal that surrogates were not only
interested in protecting the nuclear family unit whilst undertaking this “family
project” but also attempted in various ways to make surrogacy into a “couple
project”, a vehicle for strengthening the marital bond.
Surrogacy as an Educational Project
Carrying a baby that will not be part of the family is a more complicated plan
when the surrogate considers preparing her children. How do surrogates
define surrogacy, the baby, and siblinghood for their own children, and how
do they delineate the boundaries for them between the baby “in the tummy”
and their own siblings? And what is the definition of family that they employ
to normalize the project?
Surrogates in both Israel and the United States constructed surrogacy as a
family project, albeit one that involves husbands and children differently.

12 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
While surrogates in both countries waited to start the journey until their hus-
band was fully ready, they generally talked to their children about it later,
once they embarked on the “journey”. They very often presented surrogacy
as a joint project for the whole family, an educational opportunity for articu-
lating and teaching the value of helping and an occasion for modeling the
values of giving and tolerance for their children. Hadar noted that just as she
taught her daughter about her civic duty by donating her hair to cancer survi-
vors, she taught her through surrogacy as well. Lea said: “I am showing my
children that to me education is. . .is to give them a personal example. And
this is the personal example that I want to give them, to show them what giv-
ing really is.”
US surrogates also used surrogacy as an educational opportunity, yet they
tended to frame surrogacy for their children as an example of individual self-
lessness and helping a specific couple, rather than contributing to the national
community as a civic duty. They used surrogacy as an opportunity to model
the importance of altruism and also equality, especially when carrying a baby
for a gay couple. Their message of equality centered on how a loving gay
couple deserves to be parents just like other loving couples. One surrogate
posted the story of how her young son “corrected” another kid who said that
two men cannot marry:
My son chimes in and says “Well, two boys can get married” to which the other
boys in the car try to deny and say no they can’t, and so then my son says “Yes
they can. My mommy is having a baby in her belly for our neighbors. . .and
they are two boys and they are married because I saw wedding rings on their
fingers.”
Other surrogates loved the story; many commented on how great it is to teach
kids tolerance. “I bet you’re a very proud Mama for teaching him how to be
non- judgmental and accepting of any couple who loves each other.” In such
discussions, surrogates are vocal about the values of tolerance and accep-
tance, but in taken-for-granted ways also uphold the value of marriage and
the nuclear family based on marriage. “This is how we raise our kids right, so
that by the time they are grown, ‘gay marriage’ will just be ‘marriage’.”
Metaphors of Home and Babysitting to Establish Boundaries
Beyond transforming surrogacy into a family project and educational
opportunity, surrogates were challenged to define and make explicit for
their children what constitutes family, kinship, and siblinghood. Surrogacy
necessitates that surrogates articulate a familial identity for their children

Teman and Berend 13
because they have invited a fetus/baby into their intimate familial space:
their home, and the surrogate’s maternal body. The pregnancy often inter-
feres with family routines that also need explanations. The need to articu-
late familial identity is brought into sharp relief when we compare it to the
scholarship on adoptive families in which adoptive parents, especially in
transnational and trans-racial adoption, attempt to create belonging, famil-
ial identity and relatedness in order to incorporate the adopted child
through “kinning” practices (Howell 2006; Howell and Melhuus 2007).
Surrogates make belonging, familial identity, and relatedness explicit for
the opposite aim; they work to distinguish marks of family connectedness
in order to make sure that the children understand that, although their
mother is carrying a baby in her body and in their home, this baby does not
belong to their home or family. To make these definitions tangible, surro-
gates draw on various rituals as well as notions of home and babysitting,
as we explain further.
Surrogates’ articulations of the boundaries demarcating the two families
first and foremost draw upon the idea that families share a home where a
sense of belonging connects the inhabitants. It was common in both settings
for surrogates to explicitly draw on the notion of “home” or “our house” ver-
sus “their house” when explaining surrogacy to their children, as the follow-
ing quote from an SMO surrogate conveys: “Kids are smart, just tell the truth.
You are helping someone have a baby who can’t. Remind him that it’s not
‘our baby’ we are just growing it until it’s big enough to go home with its
family.”
Making sure that the idea of the baby belonging to a separate home is
tangible and graspable to the children, some surrogates on SMO recom-
mended introducing their children to the IPs whenever possible, so that they
would know from the beginning whose baby it is and to visit the IPs home so
that their children would be able to visualize where the baby belongs. “Our
children go with us every time we visit my IPs.. . . Surrogacy is a journey
with the whole family, not just the surrogate!!!”
When personal visits are not possible, surrogates often show their children
photographs of the baby’s future parents and home. Social scientists have
established the connection between photography and the construction of fam-
ily identity and heritage (Holland, 1991; Sontag, 1973). Marianne Hirsh
(1997, p. 6) argued that after the invention of Kodac “photography quickly
became the family’s primary instrument of self-knowledge.” Through photo-
graphs, families can show others who they are. Photographs can serve to
convey family belonging even before the baby is born, as the example of an
SMO surrogate with four children of her own shows:

14 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
After we met the parents and decided to work together we told them [her
children] about my IPs. We used the “broken tummy” story. After transfer, beta
etc., we told them about the pregnancy and how the baby would go home with
my IPs. My 1st set of IPs handled it so well, they sent pictures of their house,
IF putting the crib together, etc. My kids really had a sense of where the baby
would live and who would take care of it.
Photographs work well as reminders during the surrogate pregnancy and
after the birth. One SMO surrogate advised another to keep a photo of the IPs
on the fridge “so your daughter can see them. You can easily refer to the pic-
ture when you talk about the baby. Than after the baby is born, replace the pic
with one of your IPs holding the baby. This is a great visual reminder for your
daughter about what happened to the baby.”
The idea of the baby going home to its family is especially easy for both
Israeli and US children to understand, as the idea of children being away from
home at daycare or school and then returning home is a normative familial
practice when parents work. As Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik (2013) suggest, part
of what families “do” in middle-class America is to follow a daily pattern of
being apart for at least six hours a day during the work and school week and
then to “come home.” This idea that babies can be away from home and their
parents and then return home is evoked to explain that “caring for” the baby in
their home does not make their home its permanent place of belonging. It is
not surprising that surrogates often call the pregnancy “babysitting” when
explaining why the surrobaby is a temporary guest in their house.
Israeli surrogate Carrine’s explanation to her children followed this line,
emphasizing that the baby belongs in a different family’s “house”: “when the
baby [is] grown in the tummy and mom goes to take him out, he won’t live in
our house, he will go to his parents. He isn’t ours, we are just growing him in
our tummy and when he leaves he will go to his mommy and daddy.” Dana
similarly explained: “We used to babysit a baby girl while her mom was busy
and afterwards the mom would come to pick her up, so I told them (my kids)
that this is the same thing, we are watching over a baby and then they will
come and pick her up and that’s it.”
Surrogates’ use of the babysitting metaphor alongside their emphasis on the
baby belonging to another family’s home evokes the basic questions regarding
houses and kinship that anthropologists have discussed, expanding upon Lévi-
Strauss’ (1987) classic work on house societies and kinship. Carsten and
Hugh-Jones (1995, p. 2) remind us that the house is also symbolic of the body:
“The house and the body are intimately linked. The house is an extension of
the person.” If houses are often thought of as bodies, and as the extension of
the person and of the self, as Carsten and Hugh-Jones suggest, then it is not by

Teman and Berend 15
chance that surrogates draw upon the house in order to not only articulate fam-
ily belonging but also to explain how the baby they carry in their body does
not belong to them. Hadar used a wide array of metaphors to strengthen her
children’s understanding that the baby does not “really” belong to her family,
her home, and her body:
It is like being a babysitter. Like if a friend comes to visit my son, I want him
to stay whole, fine and safe and that nothing will happen. I will watch him and
return him whole to his parents. This is the same the way I see it. It is like if you
let me borrow your car and I give it back to you, t/hey left a sapling and I
returned it to them when it was a tree. I don’t become attached to a tree.
Hadar’s words here echo those of surrogates in both Israel and the United
States who claim almost across the board that they do not become emotion-
ally attached to the baby. Elsewhere, we have discussed surrogates’ articula-
tions of their emotional distance from the babies they give birth to as
surrogates as well as their understanding of relatedness and parenthood.
Here, however, we wish to call attention to how Hadar draws upon the baby-
sitter metaphor to emphasize her sense of responsibility as a surrogate and
her use of analogies, comparing her role as surrogate not just to a babysitter,
but also to a mom hosting her son’s friend for a playdate, a friend borrowing
a car, and a gardener growing a sapling into a tree. This creative use of analo-
gies is particularly useful for surrogates when explaining siblinghood to their
children, as we will discuss further.
Clarifying Siblinghood through Analogy and Ritual
Anthropological evidence shows that the significance and interpretation of
siblinghood is culturally varied (e.g. Cicirelli, 1994; Marshall, 1983). In the
scholarship on assisted reproduction, Collard and Kashmeri (2011, p. 311)
argue that “there is little indication. . .that any consideration is given to the
potential siblingship between the surrogate’s own children and the intended
parents’ baby by virtue of their having been carried in the same womb.”
However, while gestation may not be the issue for most surrogates, clarifying
siblinghood was pertinent. Involving one’s children in the stages of the pro-
cess, including the “job” of babysitting the hosted baby necessitated that sur-
rogates, such as Maya, clarify the difference between temporary hosting and
siblinghood:
I told my daughter: “you will help us watch over these babies.” I pulled her in
to the whole subject. . . . She attended the ultrasound, she saw them (the twins)

16 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
and the whole pregnancy and she understood that she is not waiting for the
birth so she can have more brothers and sisters. . . . And the height of the whole
thing was at the circumcision ceremony [bris]. . .when we got there and she
saw the fruit of her labor, just as it is the fruit of my labor and also my husband’s,
and all of ours really.
In both countries, surrogates often employed the plural form of “we” to
describe caring for the surrogacy baby, appointing their children as partners
in “babysitting someone else’s kid”. Galia explained how she defined surro-
gacy as a family babysitting project for her daughter:
I asked my daughter, “do you like to help people?” and she said, “yes.” So I
said that mommy and daddy like to help people too, and we have friends who
want to have a baby and they can’t. The mommy has a wound in her tummy and
the doctors put the baby in my tummy and we are guarding over their baby until
he comes out and they can take him. So that is how she understood it. She
didn’t become attached and she didn’t ask questions. It was just the clearest
thing in the world to her, the most natural and clear.
Galia’s explanation above included two typical tropes common among both
Israeli and US surrogates. The first trope is the “broken tummy” explanation:
surrogates tell their children they are helping a couple become parents
because the mother’s tummy is broken, so the surrogate offered to “carry the
baby” in her tummy for her. The second trope is that they were taking care of
“the couple’s baby” and reminding the children not to become emotionally
attached or form expectations of siblinghood. As one SMO surrogate, who
was carrying twins for the same IPs she carried her previous surrogate baby,
N., also explained:
I told my children that “we” were helping a family grow, so they had ownership
in the process. Also, every time my 5 year old hugged my belly I would tell
him, “give N’s baby siblings a hug for him” or “aren’t we taking good care of
A and C’s babies?” So that we were always reminding ourselves that we were
just “babysitting”.
Surrogates also remind their children of family practices, of “doing fam-
ily” (Morgan, 1999), in order to establish that taking care of another family’s
baby did not make them that baby’s family. Along these lines, Hadar drew
upon a weekly ritual activity that she and her children did as a family—bak-
ing challah for their shared Friday night Sabbath meal—to explain to her
children that gestation does not lead to siblinghood:

Teman and Berend 17
I explained to them that mommy has a baby in her tummy, here is a picture of the
baby (ultrasound photo), and the baby isn’t ours. She is theirs because her womb
is broken and they asked us to watch over her until she goes out and we can give
her back. I said it is like if our oven breaks down so we go to our neighbor and
ask her to bake our challah for us and then she returns them to us when it is baked.
And they were great the whole pregnancy. When someone said, “hey you are
pregnant” they right away spoke up “yes, but it isn’t ours.” I think one of the
reasons they accepted it so well is because we presented it to them well.
Galia made sure both her children understood; she tested her son on his
comprehension:
I said sometimes there are mothers who have a weak tummy and they can’t take
care of their babies in their own tummies. It’s a problem, what can they do? I
said there are other mothers who can take care of the baby in their tummy for
them. So when the baby comes out, who is he? So he said to me, “What do you
mean? It is the baby of the mommy. . .with the weak tummy.” I said, “right”.
When her daughter challenged the paradigm Galia had constructed, she
made sure to set the record straight: “My daughter came to me a month before
the birth and said, ‘mom, the baby told me she wants to stay with us, she
doesn’t want to go’. . . . So I looked at her and said, ‘tell the baby that her
mommy and daddy are really, really waiting for her’.” Surrogates’ persuasive
strategies include emphasizing the consequences of the child’s helpful action
for others, in these cases for the IPs, and are central in conveying family val-
ues (Wilson and Morg, 2004).
Many SMO surrogates said it was easy for the kids to accept that the baby
was someone else’s, or that their kids were relieved that they would not have
a new sibling. One SMO surrogate wrote: “I think people make more of a
deal out of this than it needs to be. It’s a simple concept and kids can easily
grasp it.. . . It would be far weirder for him to have a new baby around the
house than for life to continue as normal, don’t you think?” Another SMO
surrogate responded:
My son is 4 and I didn’t discuss the pregnancy until I was well into my 2nd
trimester because I didn’t want to have to explain any loss to him. But, once I
was showing . . .I explained to him that I was helping another family have a
baby. He was actually relieved that he didn’t have to share me with another
baby.”
According to SMO stories, not all kids are fine with surrogacy. While
young children usually do not have any problems with it, somewhat older

18 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
kids and teenagers may not be sanguine at first. Surrogates with such children
reminded others that kids eventually get on board if the parents are matter-of-
fact and explain the issue. Once children are a little older, picture books about
helpful koalas and kangaroo pouches no longer suffice. “When I told my 10
yr old. . .he was like NO YOU ARE NOT DOING IT! I had to explain to him
for months the reasoning behind it. That we are helping someone to have a
family they can’t have one without the help. I had to explain to him how it
works and that it is NOT his sibling that we are giving away. It seems to be
ok now. He understands it more. . .and knows that I am doing it for a good
reason.”
In some other cases the older children changed their minds about surro-
gacy when their friends found it “cool”. However, all the discussions about
the topic testify to surrogates’ confidence that their children will understand
and be accepting of the family project. They sometimes remind one another:
“don’t forget, you and your husband are the adults”. While children have a
say, they are not fully equal partners.
Surrogates’ explanations to their younger children are strikingly similar;
they reference family belonging and helping others much more often than
genetic relatedness. They use babysitting metaphors rather than sperm-and-
egg stories. Surrogates talk about shared time, affection, and family rituals
(Bühler & König, 2015; Daly, 2001) much more than the shared substances
of kinship (Schneider, 1980). It is helpful to apply Kaja Finkler’s (2001, p.
236) definition of family as the “‘significant same’ group of people. . .who
perceive themselves as similar and who consider themselves related on
grounds of shared material, be it land, blood, food. . .or ideological or affec-
tive content. Most important, membership in a “significant same” group car-
ries moral obligations and responsibilities.” Surrogates refer to shared goals,
affection, and home life in their persuasive efforts and explanations and, as
we have seen, also in their dismissal of other relatives’ opposition when they
assert the importance of living life according to their own values that are
shared by husbands and children.
Separation rituals also played a role in solidifying or displaying the bound-
aries between the families and gave the surrogate’s children an active role.
Nitzan began the separation ritual before she went to the hospital; she and her
children made a goodbye party for the baby:
We wrote her letters, we drew her pictures, we wished her our wishes, we filled
balloons, we ate candy and had a goodbye party. Each one of us said something
to her, like “Go on out, it’s enough now, mommy is fat already so you can come
out,” or “you can go out now, your parents are waiting for you and will give
you a cake.”

Teman and Berend 19
The separation ritual sometimes included a gift for the baby from the surro-
gate’s children. For others it included visiting the baby in the hospital to say
goodbye. Raz relayed:
The children came to visit me in the hospital and they went up to visit the
baby because they really wanted to see him. They bought him a present and a
big balloon. They went to him and saw him and gave him the gift and that is
where the circle closed. A week later I don’t think my little one even
remembered it at all.
Whenever possible, SMO surrogates also ritualize closure after birth:
I wanted them [her kids] to see the twins with their parents at the hospital or as
soon after as possible, so they would know that the babies are safe and sound
and being taken care of. That worked out pretty well. Now they are old pros (at
4 and 5 years) since this is the second journey. They know where this baby is
going and they don’t find it confusing at all. I still want them to see him safe
and sound with the parents though. I think it provides great closure for us all.
Such closures reemphasize the boundaries of the two homes following the
temporary “hosting” of the surrogate baby. The IPs “reclaim” and provide for
“their baby” in their home, while the surrogate goes home to her own
family.
However, IPs’ cooperation is necessary to draw the family boundaries in
satisfying ways and achieve closure. Some surrogates live too far to get their
kids to meet the IPs, but others fail to receive a response from the IPs about
such meetings:
“From the very start. . .I have asked that we all get together for dinner so that
my IPs can meet my 2 kids but more so that my kids can actually put a face to
the names while we are preparing them for the baby not staying with us and
they always have something else to do so I stopped asking.”
While surrogates often find it is easier to say to their kids that they are
helping friends to become a family, maintaining this storyline is not always
possible.
Conclusion
Our findings illuminate several important points about nuclear family belong-
ing in the context of surrogacy. First, while critics worry about the commodi-
fication of motherhood and the disruption or redefinitions of family life, we

20 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
found that surrogates in both Israel and the United States make surrogacy into
a collaborative and educational nuclear-family project that reinforces the
moral centrality of family life. Second, while critics are concerned about the
surrogates’ children being traumatized by surrogacy, our findings show that
children come to understand surrogacy as a family project to help others to
create their family. Surrogates successfully articulate that shared time, place,
affection, and everyday practices make a family. Third, our findings illumi-
nate the essential role of metaphors, rituals, and photos in aiding surrogates
to negotiate surrogacy with family members.
We argue that kinning is not a useful concept to explain surrogates’ bound-
ary-making efforts. Adoptive and intended parents’ kin-making projects aim
to create relatedness between the child and the rest of the family. Surrogates,
however, are not incorporating new family members; accordingly, in their
“family project,” they employ conventional explanations about familial
belonging to defend the status quo. In the light of our data, we see surrogates’
persuasive actions as reflective of the “sanctity” of the nuclear family and the
centrality of the couple relationship, and also indicative of how family life is
imagined in the larger socio-political context. Not surprisingly, it is in this
latter context that we found some differences in surrogates’ explanations,
with US surrogates leaning more heavily on individualized notions of help-
ing while Israeli surrogates more often reference civic duty.
In line with the comparative context of this paper, it appears that surro-
gates’ articulations of surrogacy as a family project in the United States and
Israel may have implications for our understanding of surrogates’ experi-
ences in similar sociocultural contexts, such as the United Kingdom, where
open surrogacy relationships are the norm (see Jadva & Imrie, 2014).
However, the family project framework may not be applicable to contexts
where there is little or no contact between the parties and in which surrogates
are stigmatized. Ethnographic work on surrogacy in India (Pande 2014;
Rudrappa 2015) and in Russia (Khvorostyanov & Yeshua-Katz, 2020) has
shown that rather than a family project, surrogacy often becomes a family
secret that carries the risk of the surrogate “humiliating” her husband and of
being cast as a “bad mother” who “gives away her children.”
Far from the secrecy and stigma of those contexts, we found that among
US and Israeli surrogates, an understanding of intentionality, that is, IPs’
desire to have children and surrogates’ desire to help them, was closely
aligned with understandings of love and care, and thus not antithetical to
more conventional meanings of family solidarity. Thus, we see surrogates’
explanations and boundary work as confirming prevalent cultural meanings
about Western family life rather than a threat to it. We suggest that the end of
the surrogacy “family project” is an occasion calling for a higher “degree of

Teman and Berend 21
intensity in the need for family displays” (Finch, 2007, p. 72), for “doing”
and for affirmatively displaying the separation of the surrogate’s and the IPs’
nuclear family ritually, metaphorically, and visually.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their important
comments and the surrogates who shared their stories with us.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.
ORCID iD
Elly Teman https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8353-9965
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