ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides an ethnography in which the actual participants are heard and reveals their experiences. It explores the strategies by which programs determine the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns in their efforts to attract more surrogates and couples. The book aims to reveal the ways in which the program director and/or psychologist attempts to superimpose some of the traditional ideas and values associated with reproduction onto this nontraditional reproductive strategy. It presents the idea of the fertility continuum and theorizes that the life experiences of infertile couples have far-reaching predictive value for their decisions to pursue reproductive technologies. The book explores the ways in which couples, surrogates, and programs interact, providing an analysis of why certain aspects of the folk and scientific models of procreation tend to be highlighted by the participants and other aspects are deemphasized or even ignored.
