Christina Weis (2021). Surrogacy in Russia: An Ethnography of Reproductive Labour, Stratification and Migration. Emerald
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Despite the increased use of surrogacy as a fertility treatment method in Russia, this technology continues to generate controversies and heated public debates.Russian and international scholars examine legal, medical, and media discourses on surrogate motherhood in Russia, as well as online representations of surrogacy on the Internet forums and in social media (Nartova, 2009; Rivkin-Fish, 2013; Siegl, 2018).However, academic literature has so far analyzed surrogate motherhood in Russia in a limited scope and format, such as book chapters and articles on particular aspects of this phenomenon.The book under review is the first monograph devoted to the institute of surrogacy in Russia in its complexity and breadth.The book's author, Christina Weis, is a social and cultural anthropologist and a Lecturer at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK).She based her book on extensive ethnographic research conducted from 2011 to 2021 among surrogate mothers, commissioning parents, fertility clinics, and surrogacy agencies in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Karelia, and Minsk.The book explores "the social organization and cultural framing of commercial gestational surrogacy in Russia" (p. 3) in the context of global surrogacy practices and institutions.The book opens with a Prologue, in which the reader meets Gabriela, a woman from Moldova who came to St. Petersburg to offer her services as a surrogate mother to a Russian couple.The author describes how she first met Gabriela in person on a cold evening in a working-class neighborhood of St. Petersburg.Having agreed to talk about her experience, Gabriela, to the author's surprise, declined her invitation to sit in a warm café, preferring walking on icy streets.As it turns out, her contract with a surrogate agency, which she resorted to after failed attempts to find client parents on her own, forbade her to talk about
Author: Natalia A. Chernyaeva
Language: English
Subfield: Reproductive Medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4385881443