As a woman, you can roll along with the assumption that your body belongs to you and you alone. That you are an autonomous human being like everyone else. But then your fertility, your baby-making capacity comes into view and suddenly you are subjected to powers far outside yourself. Guest on this episode, UK journalist and author of The Positive Birth Book, Give Birth Like A Feminist and My Period, Milli Hill, has reported on and written about this complicated zone, the zone where woman meets ...

Science and technology is a synonym for progress. It is always considered a step forward, an improvement of our lives, a promise of new possibilities. A promise of a future that will necessarily contain more and better science and technology to make our lives ever more convenient, ever more automated, ever more under our control. For women, many of us are conditioned to welcome scientific and technological advancements as a form of liberation from our sexed bodies and its processes. Medicine, m...

The battle for control of reproduction is as old as time, and since women alone have the power to create new life, women’s bodies continue to be the de facto battlefield for that power struggle. Political, economical, and social means have been used to wrestle this unique capacity away from women themselves, but in the last hundred years or so - science and technology - invented and controlled by mostly men, have overtaken every inch of human baby-making. Dr Renate Klein, a biologist and socio...

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 wor...