Resource Extraction

Revolutionary advancements in biotechnologies has created a massive industry known as 'third-party reproduction', which has moved the process of procreation out of the domain of womanhood and into the hands of medicine and commerce. Women, or their eggs and wombs, are still needed however, which has given rise to a global market in which these biological functions are sold and rented - and used and controlled.

Award-winning filmmaker and bioethicist Jennifer Lahl has studied this "brave new world" since her days as a clinical nurse in pediatric critical care, and now she tells the real stories of the women who sell their eggs and rent their wombs in films like "Eggsploitation" and "Breeders", which shows a much darker side to this unique human trade than what the fertility industry's marketing campaigns will have us believe. 

In this episode we talk about the fraught ethics and very real physical realities around egg harvesting, surrogacy, as well as the new frontier of "gender medicine".