This Podcast Will Kill You
This Podcast Will Kill You

Special Episode: Alev Scott & Cash Cow

July 14, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

When the Maternal Body Becomes a Commodity

Journalist Alev Scott didn't set out to write about the global fertility industry. The seed was planted when she had her first child and found herself with an oversupply of breast milk. Wanting to donate it to a hospital, she instead stumbled into the unregulated online breast milk market—and was surprised to find that most of the people responding to her research ad were men, not parents of babies. That encounter led her to look more closely at how the maternal body gets broken down into its component parts—breast milk, eggs, and wombs—and sold. Her book Cash Cow is the result: a personal, compassionate, and deliberately unsettled exploration of an industry that is growing fast, largely unregulated, and ethically tangled.

The Breast Milk Market: Unregulated and Unexpected

Breast milk occupies a strange legal category. In the UK and US, it is classified as a food, which means it can be bought and sold online with virtually no oversight. The FDA and FSA advise against it, but it is not illegal. When Scott donated to a hospital milk bank, she had to undergo blood tests for STDs, sign forms promising not to take ibuprofen or other medications, and her milk was screened for pathogens and pasteurized. None of that applies to milk sold online.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 Special Episode: Alev Scott & Cash Cow
  • 2 (06:57) **How the Breast Milk Market Planted the Seed** - Alev Scott explains how her personal encounter with the online breast milk market after having her first child sparked the idea for the book
  • 3 (09:09) **Breaking the Maternal Body into Commodified Parts** - Scott explains the book's three-part structure: breast milk, eggs, and womb
  • 4 (10:57) **Surrogacy Preconceptions Overturned** - Scott describes how her views on surrogacy shifted dramatically during research
  • 5 (13:28) **The Unregulated Breast Milk Market: Who's Buying and Selling** - Scott details her research into the online breast milk marketplace
  • 6 (20:58) **The Stigma and Ethics of Selling Breast Milk** - Scott wrestles with the tension between altruistic donation and the right to sell
  • 7 (24:03) **The Cambodia Example: When Protecting Women Backfires** - Scott describes a case where Western intervention may have done more harm than good

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Social media ads for egg freezing. A craigslist-like site for breast milk. Fertility fairs featuring IVF clinics alongside shamanic nutritionists. Surrogacy contracts offering a discount for multiple embryos. The rapidly-growing global fertility industry promises hope, fulfillment, and control, as long as you can afford it. Participating in this industry can be empowering. All parts of reproduction are commodified these days, so why not use your free will to take advantage of that, whether through selling breast milk or freezing your eggs? But the global fertility industry is also blatantly exploitative, preying on those who are desperate and vulnerable in order to maximize profits. In Cash Cow: How the Maternal Body Became a Global Commodity - and the Hidden Costs for Women, author and journalist Alev Scott explores that blurred line between empowerment and exploitation in this globally varied industry. Her reporting takes her through the underbelly of the breast milk market, the complicated world of fertility tourism, and the legal and emotional turmoil of surrogacy. As she describes, the morality, legality, and expenses of different procedures are a moving target across the globe, reflecting the struggle to attach moral judgment when science and circumstances change so rapidly. Tune in for a truly fascinating conversation.

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