CASH COW

The path to parenthood winds through a complex and often opaque global market for breastmilk, eggs, sperm, and surrogacy.

In a story told with sensitivity and feeling, Scott, a journalist based in Britain, shines a light on the darker corners of the global trade in the human bodily products orbiting childbirth. Scott, a new mother seeking to donate breastmilk, is startled to discover that—in addition to women with infants—her milk is coveted by adult male fetishists and believers in its healing properties. The volume is part journalistic inquiry and part autobiography—with her personal anecdotes underscoring the strangeness of buying and selling intimate substances to complete strangers. The author journeys from Britain to continental Europe, Canada, and the U.S., where women’s eggs are traded, noting, “the global human egg market is notoriously difficult to track in terms of its individual players, but it operates on a huge scale: a crack team of Bloomberg reporters in 2024 calculated that a human egg is extracted roughly every fifteen seconds somewhere in the world.” Surrogacy, like the market for breast milk and eggs, emerges as another improbably intimate act between strangers—often from different countries, cultures, and beliefs. Companies exploiting people desperate to be parents and women seeking financial relief, as well as “altruistic” unpaid doners, are all threads connecting the female body to fertility businesses. Scott attends conferences, poses as a client, and interviews participants on all sides of these transactions to understand who wins and who loses. She returns to the question of “to whose cost and to whose profit the fertility industry functions in the ways that it does.” Full of disturbing, fascinating information, this engaging, personal account is essential reading for anyone interested in how fertility became a commodity.

Leading with empathy, a journalist and mother explores the ruthless business of babymaking.