Paper short abstract:

I compare surrogacy in Israel to gestational surrogacy in India and the US, arguing that this culturally-specific, local and nationally-bounded form of surrogacy may be more ethical .

Paper long abstract:

Today the word surrogacy seems to go hand in hand with the notion of "cross-border reproductive tourism" and much of the scholarly discussion of surrogacy is dominated by a focus on global concerns about this practice. At the center of scholarly discussions of cross-border surrogacy is the understanding that individuals entering these arrangements are at the mercy of uncertain regulatory frameworks and that the relationships between surrogates and intended parents are often shaped by middlemen arbitrating the agreements, language differences and divergent cultural understandings about money, kinship and technology. In this paper, I argue that surrogacy in Israel emerges against the global circuit as a very culturally-specific, local and nationally-bounded form of surrogacy in which all arrangements are legal and closely regulated and monitored directly by the state. In my prior work (Teman 2010), I have critiqued the Israeli surrogacy law of 1996 for its restrictiveness as it prohibits international, inter-religious, single-parent and same-sex surrogacy arrangements on Israeli soil and effectively ensuring that Israeli surrogacy arrangements produce only Jewish-Israeli citizens and hetero-normative, nuclear families. Yet I suggest here that the Israeli surrogacy law, with its myriad prohibitions, centralized provisions for screening the surrogate and intended parents, standardized contractual protections for all parties involved including the baby, and the centralized government approval of each and every contract emerges in a different light when recent global developments in the surrogacy arena are taken into consideration.