Cash Cow:
How the maternal body became a global commodity – and the hidden costs for women
by Alev Scott (Harper 360)
The origin of this book is the author’s own pregnancy. As a new mother, she stumbled into a world that she (and most other people I suspect) did not know about, and turned her skills as a journalist on it.
The topic is marketing bodies, which sounds both more and less dire than what goes on in the book. It could be a look at fertility and childbirth in general, but it has a materialist focus – what the process actually is for these things.
It reveals the unexpected, and is willing to be uncomfortable in not knowing all the answers even with it providing a lot more facts. The weakness is that some of these areas are too complex for the treatment they get, largely because the law and practice around them varies so much.
The author wants to provide a personal tone. I like this in the abstract because it makes a lot of sense in the context – personalizing the depersonalized through the author’s own participation. But the author’s voice is not consistent. She is not bound to be, of course, with the previous paragraph in mind, but there are the occasional section where her commentary falls flat.
Still, it ends up as a strong recommend based on it disclosing the uncomfortable and beginning an examination.
My thanks to the author, Alev Scott, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Harper 360, for making the ARC available to me.
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