Veronika Siegl is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Geography, University of Bern, and at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. She has published articles in journals such as the Anthropological Journal of European Studies and Curare. Journal of Medical Anthropology*, and is co-editor of the photo-text-book Hope.

Intimate Strangers emerges as one of the most up-to-date and all-sided accounts of surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine.- Maria Kirpichenko (H-Diplo) Intimate Strangers is an ethnography tendered with rigour as well as sensitivity, that readers would not only enjoy reading but that also engages with the life experiences of surrogates, the start-up stories of facilitators, and the reproductive requests and dreams of prospective parents suffering from various kinds of infertility.- Jung Chen (Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters) This book is an important contribution to critical understandings of surrogacy arrangements as shaped by social context. Siegl compellingly shows how the economic is made moral through ethical labor, even as the truths actors espouse remain fragile.(Slavic Review) Tracing the ethical self-work by which surrogates, clinicians, and prospective parents explain and sit-uate reproductive practices in moral terms, Intimate Strangers offers a compelling extension of the notion of moral economy...(Medical Anthropology Quarterly)

• IntroductionPart I1. The Biopolitics of Motherhood2. Secret ConceptionsPart II3. Choreographing Surrogacy4. Doing It Business-Style5. Technologies of AlignmentPart III6. Laboring with Happiness7. Ambivalences of FreedomConclusionAfterward