Alev Scott
speaker
384 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 14 Jul
Alev Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I really didn't set out to write about the fertility industry or the breast milk market, but it kind of came about serendipitously when I had my first child a few years ago.
It sort of did come from that initial encounter I had with the online breast milk market.
And I suppose it was natural for my curiosity to go from there to other parts of the maternal body that are commodified.
I was extremely lucky.
I had a very easy heteronormative
route to motherhood, I didn't go through IVF, but many of my friends have either gone through IVF or are considering doing so, or they're having their eggs frozen, or they're looking at surrogacy.
And so when I'd encountered that world before, I'd seen it through their eyes, but I began to see it a
from this perspective, I suppose, of what are we actually doing here?
What does the industry entail?
How is it that there are such different laws and regulations in one country from the other?
And how much does cultural attitude play into that?
To be totally honest, I felt quite protective of some of my
when they were embarking on these IVF journeys, because I could see that they were, well, they were obviously desperate to have children, but they were very vulnerable as consumers as well.
So I was looking at it from a kind of market lens, I suppose.
I don't know how better to explain it really other than my very personal, very visceral encounter with the breast milk industry online sort of matched up with my curiosity about the IVF market in other ways.
And they kind of came together in this book.
I forced myself to be quite literal about what I was doing, which was really kind of breaking the maternal body down into its composite parts, the sort of byproducts of fertility in a way, or the stepping stones to having a child.
And it made me think of a Dutch book I'd encountered, which was written by a Dutch artist about the uses of one commercially raised pig as
And she detailed hundreds of uses of its body parts, everything from cigarettes to body, like to paint, to bullets, like crazy stuff.
Anyway, that made me think about how the bits of the maternal body are commodified.
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