Like, what was it like to wander around the show, and what do you think it says about the global fertility industry or the fertility industry, you know, where this show was held?

Yeah, it was a really, really interesting experience, and I definitely felt like a consumer walking around that show.

And that is another kind of interesting point for me about the whole fertility industry is, is to what extent are people consumers versus patients.

So obviously, a lot of fertility treatment is elective.

There are certain cases where, I don't know, for example, a woman who's been diagnosed with cancer has to freeze her eggs if she wants any chance of having children after treatment.

But usually, it's women electing to do that because they're worried that at some point they'll want a child and they'll no longer be fertile.

And that worry, that an- anxiety is something that's very much monetized, arguably exploited.

Like what does a surrogacy contract in the US, what does it look like? Like, what are the expectations for the surrogate and the intended parents?

Tell us a bit about where you began looking at the market for eggs.

So I began in London.

[gentle music] Many of my friends in their thirties have been freezing their eggs, and I was interested in kind of looking at how that worked, the extent to which clinics are policed and how they market their services.

There's a lot of kind of big promises made by IVF clinics about kind of putting your fertility on hold, banking your eggs for the future, and I was trying to find out to what extent that is always done with the care that I think it should be.

[gentle music] So with an American surrogacy lawyer, I got into a big philosophical debate about whether clinics that kind of basically prey on women who are very worried about their future fertility, whether that is exploitative or just being part of the market, taking advantage of the market.

So the lawyer was very much of the opinion that, look, there's always gonna be a, a market for these things.

Women, couples in general, but particularly women when it comes to egg freezing, are worried about their future fertility.

For you, you know, having been to Cyprus, having seen both sides of that equation-What did you learn about that whole market? You know, what was your big takeaway?

I mean, how common is this?

The online market itself, the informal, you know, there's the stuff on Facebook Marketplace.

The website I was using is called Only the Breast.

It's much bigger in the US than it is here in the UK.

But actually, for all the sort of squeamishness that I felt when I was being approached by men for my breast milk, I did not feel as morally conflicted about that trade as I did about the big American pharmaceutical companies that make huge profits on milk donations.

Tell us about the farmer aspect.

So the farmer aspect... kind of presents itself in an altruistic way, right? So often the ads that they have on their websites, the invitations to lactating women to donate their milk, make it sound like it's a charitable endeavour in many cases.

So I began in