Birthing a Mother is the first ethnography to explore the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. In this insightful and beautifully written 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 babies they carry even as intended mothers accomplish a complicated transition to motherhood. Teman's groundbreaking analysis reveals that surrogates develop profound and lasting bonds with intended mothers even as they psychologically and emotionally disengage from the babies.