Review Of Weisberg, The Birth Of Surrogacy In Israel

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JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES

The Birth of Surrogacy in Israel D. Kelly Weisberg. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. 304 pgs. $59.95 Reviewed by Elly Teman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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 governmentsupervised. This unique piece of legislation includes many restrictions imposed by Jewish law (halacha). Now celebrating its tenth anniversary and responsible for the birth of over 100 babies, the time has come to tell the story of how this law came into being. This is exactly what D. Kelly Weisberg does in The Birth of Surrogacy in Israel. A law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, who specializes in family law and feminist legal theory, Weisberg returns to her roots as a sociologist to present a fascinating ethnographic account of the events leading to the law’s enactment. Drawing upon interviews she conducted with the main protagonists involved in the law reform process, as well as with the first surrogates and infertile couples to pursue surrogacy arrangements in Israel, her narrative writing style dramatizes the actions of the main actors on the Israeli surrogacy scene and unfolds at an exciting pace usually reserved for novels. Starting with the landmark Israeli Supreme Court case of Nachmani v. Nachmani, which served as the catalyst for the Israeli parliament to speedily put together a law turning surrogacy into a state-controlled process, Weisberg delineates the inner politics and negotiations that led to the law’s formation. While analyzing the feminist dilemmas of the specific form that surrogacy took in Israel, Weisberg provides a broader view of the constituent elements of Israeli society that shaped surrogacy’s framework and acceptance. She discusses the clash between religious parties and feminist groups over the terms of the law, providing keen insights into how the interrelationship between judiciary, parliament, religious, and feminist power brokers shaped the construction of a unique legislative action. In sum, Weisberg marvels at how Israel’s surrogate motherhood arrangements can work so well and how other countries can learn from the Israeli example. Her book should be of interest to legal scholars and

BOOK REVIEWS

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anthropologists who are interested in the intersection of politics, religion, and new reproductive technologies. It is also recommended for potential parents considering surrogacy and those interested in women’s and family issues and the adaptation of Jewish law to modern technologies.

Disciples of Passion Hoda Barakat, translated by Marilyn Booth. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005. 136 pp. Reviewed by Moneera al-Ghadeer, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Hoda Barakat delves inside the psyche, describing a realm of memories, obscurity, fragility, and forgetfulness. Marking the Arabic literary scene since 1993, Disciples of Passion is a work of art and renders Barakat a remarkable novelist. Her other novels, Stone of Laughter (1990) and The Tiller of Waters (1998), are burdened by a conceptual exploration of war and conflict and a persistent desire to look into how the human mind experiences, reacts, and suffers during disastrous events. Disciples of Passion goes even further in exposing the pathology of violence. The text runs from its thematic concern, the war, much like its narrator, who rushes to seek shelter from the blast and shelling. Barakat’s war is a different one. No scenes of wreckage, no waste or ruins, as in most novels about war. She is not interested in portraying the external scenes of destruction; she goes inside the narrator’s psyche during its most fragile and traumatized state while trembling in insanity. Indeed, the narrative inhabits a psyche ravaged by war, represented instantly at the beginning of the novel. How violent is her opening sentence and how riveting: “After killing her, I sat down on a high boulder” (1). The novel so emphatically stages its narrative mystery in this assertive short sentence that continues to arrest and intrigue the reader. But in another killing, the narrator feels that he inhales and devours her: “At the moment I killed her, when I saw and realized that I had killed her, I knew that I had breathed in her soul. I swallowed the angel of her, and it was within me” (2). What is the crime? Who is she? Why did the narrator murder her? Is he mad? All these questions linger while the narrator unfolds bits and pieces of stories pouring from a devastated memory wounded by terror, forgetfulness, and an impenetrable past. His narration does not offer a com-

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Birthing a Mother The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self Elly Teman 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. Elly Teman is a Research Fellow at the Penn Center for the Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies at the University of Pennsylvania. Forthcoming in FEBRUARY 368 pages, 6 x 9”, 11 b/w photographs, 1 line illustration $55.00 cloth 978-0-520-25963-8 $21.95 paper 978-0-520-25964-5

To order online: www.ucpress.edu/9780520259645 For a 20% discount use this source code: 10M9071 (please enter this code in the special instructions box.)

Illustration from Yedioth Aharonot newspaper. Courtesy of the artist, Rutu Modan.