Surrogacy In Canada

This book brings together a range of perspectives on the governance of surrogacy in Canada. It offers insight into how to address the challenges of regulating, and how to (re)think the governance of surrogacy in ways that address the health, well-being, and autonomy of surrogates. It also provides long-awaited data about how surrogacy is occurring.

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

Regulating Creation is a collection of essays featuring contributions by Canadian and international scholars. It offers a variety of perspectives on the role of law in dealing with the legal, ethical, and policy issues surrounding changing reproductive technologies.

This is an ethnography which probes the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. Teman shows how surrogates and intended mothers carefully negotiate their cooperative endeavour.

Surrogacy is IndiaÕs 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 IndiaÕs 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, PandeÕs research focuses on how reproduction meets production in surrogacy and how this reflects characteristics of IndiaÕs larger labor system. PandeÕs 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 IndiaÕs 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.

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/

Co-Published with the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History Property on Trial is a collection of 14 studies of Canadian property law disputes -- some well-known, some more obscure -- that have helped to shape the contours of the principles and rules of property law over 150 years. These studies, written by some of Canada's leading legal historians, range in time from a discussion of a nineteenth-century dispute over the ownership of seal pelts in Newfoundland to modern questions of what constitutes private property in a digital age. They investigate the relationship between private and public interests in property; the limits of private property owners' rights in relation to others, particularly neighbours and family; and the intersection of property law principles with other branches of the law, including criminal law, family law, and human rights. The authors describe, in rich detail, the social, cultural, and political contexts in which the events unfolded, the backgrounds and personalities of the litigants, the skills of the lawyers, and the judicial attitudes of the day. On the one hand, Property on Trial is a collection of thoughtful and compelling stories about conflict in a wide variety of contexts, each with its own heroines and heroes, villains and ne'er-do-wells, winners and losers. On the other, it is an insightful look at the history of property law doctrine in Canada.