The Online World of Surrogacy

The Online World of Surrogacy
Author: Zsuzsa Berend
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785332759

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Zsuzsa Berend presents a methodologically innovative ethnography of SurroMomsOnline.com, the largest surrogacy support website in the United States. Surrogates’ views emerge from the stories, debates, and discussions that unfold online. The Online World of Surrogacy documents these collective meaning-making practices and explores their practical, emotional, and moral implications. In doing so, the book works through themes of interest across the social sciences, including definitions of parenthood, the symbolic role of money, reproductive loss, altruism, and the moral valuation of relationships.

Wombs in Labor

Wombs in Labor
Author: Amrita Pande
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2014-09-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231538189

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Surrogacy is India's new form of outsourcing, as couples from all over the world hire Indian women to bear their children for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere with little to no government oversight or regulation. In the first detailed ethnography of India's surrogacy industry, Amrita Pande visits clinics and hostels and speaks with surrogates and their families, clients, doctors, brokers, and hostel matrons in order to shed light on this burgeoning business and the experiences of the laborers within it. From recruitment to training to delivery, Pande's research focuses on how reproduction meets production in surrogacy and how this reflects characteristics of India's larger labor system. Pande's interviews prove surrogates are more than victims of disciplinary power, and she examines the strategies they deploy to retain control over their bodies and reproductive futures. While some women are coerced into the business by their families, others negotiate with clients and their clinics to gain access to technologies and networks otherwise closed to them. As surrogates, the women Pande meets get to know and make the most of advanced medical discoveries. They traverse borders and straddle relationships that test the boundaries of race, class, religion, and nationality. Those who focus on the inherent inequalities of India's surrogacy industry believe the practice should be either banned or strictly regulated. Pande instead advocates for a better understanding of this complex labor market, envisioning an international model of fair-trade surrogacy founded on openness and transparency in all business, medical, and emotional exchanges.

Surrogacy Was the Way

Surrogacy Was the Way
Author: Zara Griswold
Publisher: Nightengale Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2006
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1933449187

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Surrogacy Was the Way: Twenty Intended Mothers Tell Their Stories documents the true stories of twenty women who had children via surrogacy. Surrogacy is a complete possibility in today's day and age, but anyone considering this route to parenthood should know the pros and cons. The women featured go to surrogacy for a variety of reasons, ranging from Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH) to cancer to unexplained infertility and everything in between. Some of the journeys go rather smoothly-while others are filled with one obstacle after another. Some of the women have children already and want to add to their family, while most are attempting to become moms for the first time. What they all have in common, however, is that every woman whose story is told knows what it's like to be an intended mother-the term for the "mother to be" if and when a baby is born. And all of the women ultimately end up having a child (or more) through surrogacy. When I first started researching surrogacy, I was fortunate to find several Online support groups. As I gave and received support to so many other women I became fascinated with the extent to which people would go to simply have a baby. I realized that their stories-our stories-needed to be heard; thus, the idea for this book was born. For the millions of women who have been touched by infertility in some way, or know someone who has, Surrogacy Was the Way will open their eyes to amazing possibilities. It will show them that they do have options, and with persistence and faith, they can achieve their dreams of motherhood after all.

Full Surrogacy Now

Full Surrogacy Now
Author: Sophie Lewis
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1786637308

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Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the “family” The surrogacy industry is estimated to be worth over $1 billion a year, and many of its surrogates around the world work in terrible conditions—deception, wage-stealing and money skimming are rife; adequate medical care is horrifyingly absent; and informed consent is depressingly rare. In Full Surrogacy Now, Sophie Lewis brings a fresh and unique perspective to the topic. Often, we think of surrogacy as the problem, but, Full Surrogacy Now argues, we need more surrogacy, not less! Rather than looking at surrogacy through a legal lens, Lewis argues that the needs and protection of surrogates should be put front and center. Their relationship to the babies they gestate must be rethought, as part of a move to recognize that reproduction is productive work. Only then can we begin to break down our assumptions that children “belong” to those whose genetics they share. Taking collective responsibility for children would radically transform our notions of kinship, helping us to see that it always takes a village to make a baby.

Birthing a Mother

Birthing a Mother
Author: Elly Teman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2010-03-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520945859

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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 cross-cultural perspectives of surrogacy in the global context, Teman traces the processes by which surrogates relinquish any maternal claim to the baby even as intended mothers accomplish a complicated transition to motherhood. Teman’s groundbreaking analysis reveals that as surrogates psychologically and emotionally disengage from the fetus they carry, they develop a profound and lasting bond with the intended mother.

Laws and Policies on Surrogacy

Laws and Policies on Surrogacy
Author: Harleen Kaur
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN: 9789811643507

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This book is an essential guide on surrogacy, discussing various legal issues that arise in surrogacy cases. It provides a comprehensive coverage to various issues pertaining to surrogacy arrangements due to failure to meet the needs of those involved in surrogacy, be it the intended parents or the surrogate mother, with special emphasis on the most vulnerable party -- the surrogate child. In the wake of this existing imbalance, the call to reform the practice of surrogacy has also increased. The book provides a comprehensive coverage to various laws and policy regulations in existence dealing with surrogacy, and unravels the latest trends and developments happening around the world as surrogacy gains importance. The international perspectives highlight policies and practices being adopted and followed by various nations with regard to surrogacy regulation and associated parenthood rules. This book also analyses some of the significant cross-border disputes revolving around surrogacy, and explores briefly the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights on matters of parentage and citizenship for children born of trans-national surrogacy with special reference to the prospects of a convention on international surrogacy currently being studied by The Hague Conference on Private International Law. Further, it highlights the issues and questions relating to surrogacy arrangements that are so far unresolved and unanswered and suggests measures for improvements to the existing proposed surrogacy legislation in India and need for uniform international regulation. The book is a great resource for legal practitioners, academics, students, policy-makers, infertility clinics, and charitable organizations working on this issue.

Adoption and Surrogate Pregnancy

Adoption and Surrogate Pregnancy
Author: Faith Merino
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2010
Genre: Adoption
ISBN: 0816080879

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Adoption and surrogate pregnancy are the two most realistic options currently available for millions of couples unable to have biological children. In the past decade, international adoption has become popular among those who wish to avoid the wait associated with adopting domestically. Yet because of unique political, economic, and cultural circumstances within individual countries, international adoption is fraught with legal controversies and difficulties. Surrogate pregnancy is a relatively new and inherently complicated alternative. With few regulations to guide the process and protect those involved, however, countries struggle to address its ethical and moral questions, in addition to the legal, political, cultural, and environmental ramifications. Providing a historic overview and defining the key issues, Adoption and Surrogate Pregnancy examines the laws related to adoption and surrogate pregnancy in five countries: the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom, and Guatemala. The discussion covers the ways in which adoption and surrogate pregnancy overlap and influence each other, the nuances that further complicate matters, and the controversies surrounding both issues—such as fears of exploitation, class discrimination, socially "unwanted" children, same-sex parenthood, and the difficulties of governing the family unit. Allowing students to compare the subjects from the perspectives of different countries and cultures, this balanced and objective volume sheds light on the way these issues affect the global community.

Handbook of Gestational Surrogacy

Handbook of Gestational Surrogacy
Author: E. Scott Sills
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2016-10-06
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1107112222

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A clinical handbook on gestational surrogacy, with thorough guidance for clinicians involved in global third-party reproductive treatment.

Transnational Reproduction

Transnational Reproduction
Author: Daisy Deomampo
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2016-09-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479890375

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Transnational Reproduction traces the relationships among Western aspiring parents, Indian surrogates, and egg donors from around the world. In the early 2010s India was one of the top providers of surrogacy services in the world. Drawing on interviews with commissioning parents, surrogates, and egg donors as well as doctors and family members, Daisy Deomampo argues that while the surrogacy industry in India offers a clear example of “stratified reproduction”—the ways in which political, economic, and social forces structure the conditions under which women carry out physical and social reproductive labor—it also complicates that concept as the various actors in this reproductive work struggle to understand their relationships to one another. The book shows how these actors make sense of their connections, illuminating the ways in which kinship ties are challenged, transformed, or reinforced in the context of transnational gestational surrogacy. The volume revisits the concept of stratified reproduction in ways that offer a more robust and nuanced understanding of race and power as ideas about kinship intersect with structures of inequality. It demonstrates that while reproductive actors share a common quest for conception, they make sense of family in the context of globalized assisted reproductive technologies in very different ways. In doing so, Deomampo uncovers the specific racial reproductive imaginaries that underpin the unequal relations at the heart of transnational surrogacy.

Labor of Love

Labor of Love
Author: Heather Jacobson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813584388

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While the practice of surrogacy has existed for millennia, new fertility technologies have allowed women to act as gestational surrogates, carrying children that are not genetically their own. While some women volunteer to act as gestational surrogates for friends or family members, others get paid for performing this service. The first ethnographic study of gestational surrogacy in the United States, Labor of Love examines the conflicted attitudes that emerge when the ostensibly priceless act of bringing a child into the world becomes a paid occupation. Heather Jacobson interviews not only surrogate mothers, but also their family members, the intended parents who employ surrogates, and the various professionals who work to facilitate the process. Seeking to understand how gestational surrogates perceive their vocation, she discovers that many regard surrogacy as a calling, but are reluctant to describe it as a job. In the process, Jacobson dissects the complex set of social attitudes underlying this resistance toward conceiving of pregnancy as a form of employment. Through her extensive field research, Jacobson gives readers a firsthand look at the many challenges faced by gestational surrogates, who deal with complicated medical procedures, delicate work-family balances, and tricky social dynamics. Yet Labor of Love also demonstrates the extent to which advances in reproductive technology are affecting all Americans, changing how we think about maternity, family, and the labor involved in giving birth. For more, visit http://www.heatherjacobsononline.com/