Breast milk is the only bodily fluid legally classed as a food by regulators both in the US and the UK. As such, women with an abundance of supply can sell it to the highest bidder. Demand is dominated not by other mothers in need, however, but by “men with a fetish for both breast milk itself and for the bodies of breastfeeding mothers”.
Until reading the journalist Alev Scott’s excellent Cash Cow, I had been blissfully unaware of the market for “erotic lactation”. She only discovered it existed herself when she found she had more milk than her second child could consume, and she began researching what she could do with it. Within hours of joining an online breast milk forum (“a bamboozling place, somewhere between Tinder and an à la carte human dairy farm”), she was inundated. All but one of the requests she received were from men. “Most were overtly sexual.”
The market for women’s bodies, and all that they produce, is enormous – and growing. While selling breast milk for £1.50 per ounce (about 30ml) won’t change a woman’s life, her eggs and womb are far more valuable. The fertility industry, Scott writes, is estimated to be worth $70.27bn by 2030. The surrogacy sector is set to explode from $27.9bn in 2025 to $201.8bn by 2034. At the heart of these transactions is a complex moral battle between female empowerment and exploitation.
In Cash Cow, Scott reveals a talent for getting her subjects to speak openly and honestly. Her dry, sceptical sense of humour shines through even the saddest moments. The book is divided into three parts, with each lifting the lid on a different industry reliant on women’s bodies: IVF, surrogacy and breast milk.
Steve is “a 60-year-old lorry driver who suffered from crippling IBS”. He claims breast milk is the only thing that alleviates the symptoms. He buys it “once or twice a month” from suppliers varying in age, from 17 to their late thirties. “I found the idea of a 17-year-old selling her milk to a 60-year-old completely disgusting,” Scott writes. Nevertheless, having agreed to give Steve some of her excess breast milk, there comes “a bombshell”: “Steve revealed that he had also tried wet-nursing.” This wasn’t, he insisted, a sexual experience. Despite her unease, Scott doesn’t back out of the sale. Steve emails Scott the next morning. “Your milk was very creamy and very sweet… a bit almond to taste but very nice,” he writes, leaving her with “a sensation of wanting to cry”.
The breast milk market isn’t all grim. Scott, for example, gifts four litres to the milk bank at Bristol’s Southmead Hospital, to feed premature babies in neonatal intensive care, who struggle more than full-term babies to digest formula.
But there is a much darker side – a “hint at real desperation”. Janet, “the Golden Wet Nurse”, is based in Texas. According to her online advert, she gave up her daughter for adoption because of money problems. She feeds other women’s babies for $50 a day, but charges men between $150 and $400 for the same service. “Does she feel safe?” Scott asks. “When I have men, I keep my gun in my pocket next to me,” comes the reply.
The fertility industry exploits hope. And fear. What allows this is a fundamental desire in many of us to have our own children: “baby lust”, a surrogacy consultant calls it. Outside the US, Northern Cyprus is one of largest global centres for IVF and surrogacy. In Lefkoşa, a city of roughly 61,000 people, Scott counts 17 IVF clinics. Posing as a woman wanting to buy donor eggs, she discovers why: its laws are far more relaxed than in the south of the island – an EU member state – and the industry is mostly unregulated. Women up to the age of 55 are allowed to undergo IVF, as are single men and women and unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples. It is, Scott says, “an all-welcoming, gay-friendly outlier in the non-European market”.
But while the recipients of donor eggs benefit with the ultimate prize – a baby of their own – the women “empowered” to pump themselves with hormones to have their eggs harvested, do not. These donors are “young students, obviously needing the cash”. Put bluntly, “women are rarely the primary beneficiary, in financial terms, of their own eggs”.
Scott uncovers a world where buyers can shop around for the baby they want. Access to the “VIP Donors” folder of girls “flown in from Russia” is possible for those willing to pay a bit more. “Girls with blonde hair and blue eyes are more expensive,” one fertility agent tells Scott. Want to know the name and family medical history of your egg donor, or even meet them? Sure. Need your egg donor to be in medical or law school? Everything is possible, for a price.
Yet there is no scientific basis on which to assess egg quality. Unlike sperm samples, which can be objectively graded for their motility (how well they swim), there is no equivalent measure for eggs. Their value is determined simply by how the donor looks. Brits “come [to Northern Cyprus] for just one thing: gender selection” – something that’s illegal in the UK.
Ivan and Bryan, a gay couple, paid $186,000 for their twins. “We wanted a boy and a girl, and we just happened to get one from my husband and one from me,” Ivan tells Scott. “We implanted them both at the same time in the surrogate, so they are twins.” But asked for his advice to others pursuing surrogacy, he answers: “Be careful with twins.” It is dangerous for women. “As soon as you transfer two embryos, it becomes a high-risk pregnancy. I just thought, ‘Cool, we will have twins.’ I love our twins, but I wouldn’t do that again. I think it is wrong.”
This is refreshing honesty. But it highlights how much surrogacy is centred around giving prospective parents what they want, rather than ensuring the safety (or wealth) of the surrogate. For example, it costs just $5,000 more to implant two embryos rather than one.
One of very few stipulations in commercial arrangements worldwide is that a surrogate must have already carried at least one child of her own to term. But this is not for the women’s benefit – to protect them against the potential emotional impact of carrying a child for someone else. No, “even the least ethical outfits do not want to waste their time with a woman who has not proved herself physically capable of doing so”, Scott explains.
Stephenie claims the title of “most experienced surrogate in the US”. She has carried 12 surrogate children. At 43, she had a hysterectomy because of the impact this had on her body. She had two children of her own in her twenties, and then “carried one or two babies” almost every year for a decade, earning between $20,000 and $60,000 each time.
Scott does not doubt the sincerity of the surrogates she speaks with. She believes them when they say they felt no bond with the children they carried, or they just “love” being pregnant. But it’s difficult to square their protestations with, for example, Stephenie’s acknowledged desire to have postpartum contact with them (added to contracts at her insistence).
The same doubt creeps in with altruistic (unpaid) surrogates. Jemma from Birmingham has carried three surrogate children, telling Scott, “I love giving birth.” Linda from British Columbia says she was a surrogate for “that look of joy on [the parents’] faces” when they first see their baby. But while these women are carrying children for others, their own appear to suffer. “My kids absolutely hated me being a surrogate,” Stephenie told Scott. Jemma acknowledges that “your children suffer during that time – they lose their mum”.
By the end of the book, I was unsure on so much. Perhaps that is the point of it. But I also recognise that I have two beautiful, healthy children. And I cannot condemn those who want the same, or those who help them achieve it.
Cash Cow: How the Maternal Body Became a Global Commodity and the Hidden Costs for Women
Alev Scott
HarperCollins, 320pp, £22
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[Further reading: Tony Blair is old Labour now]
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This article appears in the 25 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Crumbling Crown
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