In 2026 the global surrogacy industry will grow to over 30 billion dollars. The manufacturing plants and raw materials that make this massive business possible are women's bodies, and the products being bought and sold are human babies. This hugely profitable industry can only exist if a subset of women offer themselves up for highly invasive, completely unnatural, risky, and life-altering medical procedures resulting in pregnancy and birth, or alternatively “egg-harvesting” - all with little...

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...

No status puts a woman at greater vulnerability than that of being a migrant or refugee. Anna Zobnina is a Strategy and Executive Director at European Network of Migrant Women, and she knows first-hand the realities and complex challenges that migrant and refugee women face in Europe. With over 15 years of experience in feminist analysis of male violence & discrimination against women and girls, sexual and reproductive exploitation, and international human rights policy work, Anna and her organ...

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...

Women always face conflicting cultural narratives in which our sex plays a central role, and much of the time the rhetoric in the foreground is there to cover up a very different reality in the background. In this episode Elle jumps into three hotbed areas - prostitution, surrogacy and the transgender movement - with Swedish journalist and author Kajsa Ekis Ekman, who has made a career out of tearing down the stories we're being sold, digging deep into complicated issues, and revealing greater ...