Ex-Portlander’s surrogacy book draws on Israel study

By DEBORAH MOON

article created on: 2010-04-04T00:00:00

While a Portland native’s new book on surrogacy focuses on a study in Israel, the country with the world’s first and most extensive surrogacy regulations, the human experience of dealing with that strange situation is common to other surrogates around the world.

Elly Teman’s “Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self,” published March 4 by University of California Press, is based on the author’s PhD dissertation research at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A third-generation Portland native, Teman attended Hillel Academy and Congregation Shaarie Torah, where her grandparents Ruth and Robert Erlich are still members. Her great-grandmother Tillie Nepom arrived in Portland in 1913 at the age of 13, just months older than Teman was when she moved to Israel with her parents Rhisa and Nissan Teman at age 12½.

Israel’s “Embryo Carrying Agreements Law” had just legalized gestational surrogacy when Teman began her graduate studies. She said she immediately thought it would be a great anthropological case study. She began her PhD studies in 1998, just after the first surrogate birth in Israel, which “went wrong” and drew intense scrutiny of “what not to do in surrogacy,” she said. The resulting furor created even more intense regulation of surrogacy in Israel.

A cultural anthropologist, Teman decided to look at the strange situation of a couple having another woman carry their baby and how the surrogate deals with “being pregnant while not expecting a baby.”

“The human experience of making sense of this predicament is common to other surrogates in other places,” she said.

Teman said all couples considering surrogacy fear that the surrogate mother will bond with the baby, such as in the famed Baby M case in which the surrogate mother fought a court battle to retain custody of the baby.

“When you read this book and listen to the words of women acting as surrogates, they are making informed, rational decisions,” said Teman, noting that in Israel the women are gestational surrogates who conceive through invitro fertilization rather than the artificial insemination that made Baby M the genetic daughter of the surrogate.

“They see how high the stakes are for the technology to work and they see how much the couple has riding on it to become parents,” she said. “From the beginning, surrogates talk about dividing themselves … referring to their belly area as ‘not me.’ They have to mark their limits to remember where their boundaries are.”

In Israel, a small country where the farthest surrogates could live from the couple is four hours, surrogates often form strong bonds with the couple for whom they are carrying a child, Teman said. She added that sharing a language and culture also help unite them. (Israeli law requires the host and genetic mother to be the same religion).

“They (surrogate mothers) don’t want to be choked and taken over, but they do want to share the experience with the ‘intended mother’ (as the genetic mother is known in Israeli law),” she said.

The intended mother frequently accompanies the surrogate to all doctor’s appointements, takes home the ultrasound pictures and does the things they think pregnant women do. The mother is usually with the surrogate during the birth process.

Teman said that “they transition into being a mother through the process.” She said some of the women she studied actually had a pseudo pregnancy, gaining weight and feeling contractions. Two women, with no hormone injections, spontaneously developed breast milk.

In Israel, the laws aid the process, calling the surrogate the “carrying mother” and the biological mother the “intended mother.” Culturally, the difference is even stronger with the surrogate commonly being referred to as an “Innkeeper, who is hosting this family coming into being.”

Israeli law, originally written to ensure children were halachically Jewish, has expanded over the years to protect the surrogate’s mental and physical health, as well as the intended parents’ rights. A state committee must approve every surrogate arrangement. The committee screens the surrogate and the couple psychologically and medically screens the surrogate. The committee ensures the contract is valid and that it provides for contingencies such as what happens if the baby has a birth defect or who will the guardians be if the parents die before the birth.

Conversely in the United States, regulations vary from state to state and even between different surrogate agencies in the same state.

In Israel, Teman said surrogates are much more open about being paid for their effort. All Israeli surrogates are single women, many single mothers who use the money to raise their own children.

“It doesn’t mean it’s not a mitzvah just because they are using the money to get ahead,” Teman said the surrogates reason.

Teman is now a research fellow at the Penn Center for the Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies at the Universityh of Pennsylvania, where she is studying how ultra-Orthodox women make decisions on prenatal genetic tests.