Milk and eggs: How women’s bodies became a global commodity – The Saturday Story
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From men wanting to buy her breast milk, to going undercover in the IVF wild west, investigative journalist and author Alev Scott has immersed herself in the murky, and often unregulated world of fertility. What she found was a trillion dollar industry, where the maternal body is a hot commodity. It also raised some serious ethical questions: How much, if anything, should breastmilk cost? Who should be allowed to buy it? And is it right that you can pay more for ‘VIP’ egg donors?
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Guests: Alev Scott, investigative journalist and author of Cash Cow.
Host: Manveen Rana.
Producer: Dave Creasey.
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Read more: Undercover in Europe’s infertility and surrogacy industry
Photo: Getty Images & Mark Harrison for the Times magazine.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story on Saturday. I'm Manvien Rana. |
| 0:06.0 | I'm Manvien Rana. |
| 0:10.0 | Four months after giving birth to my first child, I had discovered that I had a oversupply of milk. |
| 0:24.4 | It's 11pm, one night in the height of lockdown in 2021, and the journalist and author, |
| 0:32.7 | Aleph Scott, is sitting in her study, laptop open. |
| 0:44.2 | I didn't intend to sell my milk, but I wanted to know who was going to approach me and I was expecting it to be perhaps other mothers with a low milk supply or adopted parents, gay parents. |
| 0:51.0 | She's recently set up an account on only thebreast.com, a site created for parents in need of breast milk for their babies. |
| 1:01.1 | But the vast majority of people who approached me within hours of setting up this account were men. |
| 1:15.0 | This was in no way what she'd been expecting. |
| 1:25.8 | Quite a few of them initially claimed that they needed breast milk for health reasons or because they were bodybuilders. |
| 1:28.8 | A lot of bodybuilders are convinced that breast milk grows muscle more efficiently than anything else. However, some of the men who approached me didn't |
| 1:34.7 | bother with any kind of medical reason, whether that was an excuse or not. They were just |
| 1:39.2 | sexual requests. They wanted the milk itself. They wanted videos of me pumping my milk. And some of them |
| 1:47.6 | requested wet nursing, adult wet nursing, so they wanted me to breastfeed them. This was an |
| 1:53.7 | experiment I did to research the online commercial breast milk market. I did not expect it to go the way that it did. |
| 2:03.8 | I just went deeper down the rabbit hole. |
| 2:10.4 | It was this experience that propelled Aleph headlong into an investigation of this shady world of sexual kinks and an unregulated black |
| 2:21.2 | market for breast milk and from there to an undercover study of the murky industry that deals |
| 2:28.3 | with every aspect of maternity from egg freezing to surrogacy. |
| 2:35.3 | Today, we talked to her about her devastating new book. |
| 2:40.6 | The story today, Cash Cow, how the maternal body became a global commodity. |
| 2:50.7 | Music I'm Alev Scott. I'm Alev Scott. I'm a journalist and author. My latest book is called Cash Cow. It's about how the maternal body is commodified. It's about the darker sides of the |
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