December 20, 2024 • 24 mins
A new series from the Big Take podcast investigates the booming market for human eggs. It’s a global and opaque market where demand is so great, that even where regulations are in place, there are powerful incentives to evade them.
In this episode, host Sarah Holder and Bloomberg’s Vernon Silver focus on one fertility clinic in Greece that police say stole the eggs of as many as 75 women. It’s a story that shows how the actions of one clinic can have ripple effects around the world and reveals the unique ways that the fertility industry runs not only on capital, but on trust.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. In early twenty twenty,
after a long struggle to get pregnant, Maria and her
husband started IVF, but Maria still considered herself lucky.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
She lives on the island of Crete in the town
called Hanya, where, much to her good fortune, one of
the most prominent fertility clinics had been set up a
couple decades earlier.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
That's Vernon Silver. He's an investigative reporter at Bloomberg, and
he traveled from his home base in Rome to Greece
to report this story. Maria is a pseudonym. She asked
us not to use her real name and didn't want
to be recorded. Her hometown of Hanya is a seaside
tourist destination with a close knit community famous for its
(00:55):
centuries old harbor. The clinic where Maria went is about
a ten minute walk from them. At harbor, it was
called the Mediterranean Fertility Institute, and it drew customers from
all over the world.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
In recent years, it had become a hub for customers
from Italy, or Australia or the US. So right there
in her backyard was a clinic that could provide exactly
what she and her husband needed to try to have
this baby.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
It all seemed pretty standard. The clinic did a procedure
to retrieve Maria's eggs. Staff fertilized them with her husband's
sperm and implanted an embryo. She told Vernon it took
three cycles of IVF, but finally it worked.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
She eventually did get pregnant and she had a child.
Her dream had come true.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Maria became a mother and for the next three years
she raised her baby, who grew into a toddler. Then,
one day in February twenty twenty four, she got a
call from the police.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
The police asker had come down to the police station
and she walked into the room and there were two
police officers and a third person who was a psychologist.
And when Maria saw the psychologist, her heart sunk. She knew,
she knew she was about to get bad news. They
(02:20):
sat her down, The four of them sat around a desk,
and they broke the news to her that their investigation
had found that her eggs had been stolen.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Stolen. She didn't donate them or sell them. She initially
didn't even know they'd been taken from her.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
When she had had her eggs harvested to make her
own child. People at this clinic, according to the police,
had secretly taken about half of those eggs and given
them to another woman.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
This is episode two of The Huge Human Egg Trade,
a special series from Bloomberg's investigations team and the Big
Take podcast about the booming global market for human eggs.
Bloomberg reporters across five continents and eleven countries have spent
the last year trying to understand how human eggs are
bought and sold around the world. They've shed light on
(03:21):
the thirty five billion dollar market for assisted reproduction, an
opaque market where regulations vary widely from country to country.
It's a patchwork that can push some people to travel
great distances in their quest for a child, and can
also create opportunities for bad actors looking for a cut
of the trade. Today, we zoom in on one clinic
(03:43):
in Greece where police have identified as many as seventy
five cases of egg theft. Seventy five cases where a
woman's eggs were allegedly taken without her consent and sold
or donated to another person. It's a story that shows
how the actions of one clinic can have ripple effects
around the world that can reverberate for decades, and it
(04:06):
reveals the unique ways that the fertility industry runs not
only on capital, but on trust. Will continue after the
break after a year of digging into the fertility industry,
(04:30):
Bloomberg's Vernon Silver says, the trade of human eggs behaves
much like the trade of any commodity.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Like any global commodity trade, where you ship things, where
you invest, where you go for the best deal, depends
on regulations and prices, and it's kind of like squeezing
a water balloon, where if there's pressure at one place,
you know everybody's going to go somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
In recent years, as other fertility hotspots like India and
Thailand tighten their regulations, and after Russia began its full
scale invasion of Ukraine, Vernon says, some of that trade
shifted to Greece. If you're a couple or a person
needing a fertility treatment, what is the pitch that Greece
(05:16):
gives to them.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Greece has positioned itself, along with other countries that have
nice beaches, as a location for medical tourism, which applies
to fertility treatments. When it comes to eggs and the
other services like surrogacy an IVF its prices are lower
than in the United States, for example. In other Western countries.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
The country's legal framework is another selling point.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
There are a lot of restrictions in a lot of
countries that make it harder to do IVF or to
get a donor egg in a country like Italy, for example,
or Australia, and those restrictions are much less in Greece.
Combination of legal framework, money access and you know, a
(06:05):
friendly accepting economy based really from the government that wants
to promote this sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
And nice beaches and nice.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Beaches, I mean. Part of what happens when you are
seeking a fertility treatment, especially if it involves you know,
a donor egg, is somebody will travel, let's say, with
her husband to Greece, go to the clinic. The husband
will provide a sperm sample that will be used to
fertilize the donor egg. They wait around on the beach
in a nice hotel, have a good meal while the
(06:35):
wife is being prepared to have this growing embryo implanted
in her. And so it's always good to have a
nice place to do this that's pleasant and hang out
and cost effective.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Vernon says Greece's fertility industry has another geographic advantage proximity
to Eastern Europe.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Borders on poorer Eastern European countries, where there are women
who might want to be paid for their eggs and
also to be surrogates, which is a related industry in
the fertility industry.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Women from countries like Georgia and Bulgaria, who Vernon says,
are often motivated to sell their eggs because it pays
more than many other kinds of work, but that dynamic
has created opportunities for abuse.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Going back a decade, there had been a series of
busts by the Greek authorities, mostly in the northern city
of Thessaloniki, where they had tried to crack down on
people being pressured or manipulated or trafficked into giving up
their eggs. And so while Greece is not the biggest
(07:41):
market for eggs, you have Ukraine, you have Spain, which
are sort of massive hubs for egg banks, and that
sort of thing. You had some of the worst behavior
already being exposed in Greece.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
The clinic where Maria went the Mediterranean Fertility institute had
been on the radar of Greek regulators for years. In
twenty nineteen, the Greek agency overseeing medically assisted reproduction sent
a team of inspectors to the clinic to look into
a complaint about its surrogacy program. The team ultimately voted
to suspend the clinic's license for improper record keeping, but
(08:16):
the suspension went unenforced and the clinic remained open. It
would take another four years before Greek authorities were once
again at its door.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
A few months before the police invited Mario over to
break her the bad news about her own eggs. There
had been a bust and this had to do with
surrogacy and other issues, not egg theft yet, and because
of that bust, the clinic shutdown.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
The police told Vernon they were once again looking into
the clinic surrogacy practices, but once they got inside, they
found evidence of other kinds of crime.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
What the police had found in their investigation of this
clinic was that there were these handwritten records that showed
on a certain day, an IVF patient like Maria would
have her eggs removed and they would say how many
there were, and on that same day, about half that
many showed up in these handwritten records as being donations
to another woman of fresh eggs, meaning non frozen eggs,
(09:16):
eggs that had been extracted that day, and if that
woman had been the only person who had come in
to get her eggs removed, the police were fairly confident
that they could conclude that that exact match. For example,
twelve eggs removed from patient A and then six given
as a donation to patient B, and six made use
(09:38):
of by patient A the original one. That all added
up to them literally siphoning off half of the eggs
for somebody else.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
The police also found that the clinic had a consent
for him with a box that patients could check if
they were willing to donate some of their unused embryos
eggs that were successfully fertilized. And when the police sat
down with Maria, they really wanted to ask her about
that piece of paperwork.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
What they wanted to know from Maria was had she
consented to this quote.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Donation and had she She.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Said she definitely did not. In fact, she remembered the
consent form that she signed, and she said, you know,
this consent form had a box to tick about donating
any unused embryos which she did not tick, and nothing
about donating any excess eggs, and so at that point,
(10:30):
as it would turn out that she was one of
scores of women who were getting similar calls with the
police telling them the same thing and wanting to know
the same basic question, did you consent to this? Because
the records we have found showed that half of your
eggs went to somebody else.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
If you're a woman in Maria's position, leaving the clinic
that day and the police never call you, how would
you ever know that your eggs had been stolen?
Speaker 2 (10:58):
You would never know. Possibly you could know later on,
you know, if somebody did a twenty three and me test,
or if you walk down the street and saw someone
who looked a lot like your own kid. I mean,
there are ways conceivably to find out.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
A DNA test, a gut feeling, but in the moment,
it's impossible to know. That's because a woman undergoing an
egg retrievrole is typically given anesthesia. It's only after she
comes to that she's told exactly how many eggs were collected.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
But the really haunting aspect of all of this is
that if the police hadn't been doing an investigation of
this clinic, which they were doing for other reasons. If
that hadn't happened, she likely would never have been called
to the police station and been told this information, and she.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Might never know when we come back, what happened to
the eggs and embryos stored at the Mediterranean Fertility Institute
when it suddenly shut down, and what the fallout of
the investigation has meant for the women whose eggs were stolen.
(12:11):
Earlier this year, Bloomberg's Vernon Silver went to visit a
secure room at Khanya General Hospital on the Greek island
of Crete. He was there to see the genetic material
that authorities had seized from the Mediterranean Fertility Institute without sansos.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Is it top secret? Can I take a picture?
Speaker 4 (12:30):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
A doctor punched a passcode into a keypad and unlocked
the door to the climate controlled room.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
It's nice and cold, nice and colored, of course.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Inside, they showed Vernon the six rounded metal containers that
were lined up against a wall.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
It looks like R two D two from Star Wars.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
The canisters looked like a cross between an ancient Greek
amphora and a propane tank. Rounded metal containers with wheels
on the bottom and two handles on top. The lids
were fitted with handwritten labels and temperature monitors in these.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Things here they so this is an expensive operation because
you also have this thing that goes down. What is that?
That's the ice.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
The canisters were filled with liquid nitrogen and between the
six of them all the genetic material that had been
seized from the Mediterranean Fertility Institute. In total, they contained
the eggs, embryos, and sperm of about nine hundred people.
But Vernon says the canisters represent only part of the
(13:39):
chaos that ensued from the clinic's closure.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Really heartbreaking chaos, because this is a clinic that had
stored embryos and eggs and hired surrogates to carry people's
babies for them. So they were dealing with everything from
frozen eggs and embryos, to pregnant women to babies who
had to literally be sorted out with DNA test.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
In the early morning hours of August eighth, twenty twenty three,
when police descended on the Mediterranean Fertility Institute, the clinic
was working with a number of pregnant surrogates, and after
it was abruptly shut down. The Kanya General Hospital took
over their care and the care of the seventeen babies
they gave birth to. It would take eight months and
(14:29):
DNA testing to match them to their families and determine custody.
Vernon says what to do with the genetic material inside
the canisters was another piece of the puzzle. Some of
it came from local clients like Maria, some of it
had come from Ukrainian cryobanks, whose staff sent it out
of the country for safe keeping after Russia invaded, and
(14:52):
some of it had come from the clinic's foreign clients.
The embryologists charged with caring for them told Vernon the
ca canisters contained frozen eggs and embryos from about one
hundred and twenty five people who had come from outside Greece.
Some of those people had traveled from as far away
as India and Australia to use the clinic services, and
(15:14):
some were clients of Sam Everingham.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
So parents were contacting me saying, look way here for
the birth of that child, but no one's here. The
staff of all gone. They're in gile wirestock.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Sam is the founder of Growing Families Global. Its mission
is to support and inform people looking for safe, ethical
fertility services. He says people often reach out to his
organization when they can't source surrogates or donors in their
own countries and are hoping to find information about options overseas.
(15:51):
Representatives from the Mediterranean Fertility Institute had spoken at events
his organization hosted in Australia. He'd even gone to visit
the facility himself, and he says he was shocked when
he heard what had gone wrong there.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Oh, it was horrifying. Yeah, it was really tough. We
had to get them in touch with the Greek lawyers
to help out there. Some of them wanted to take
cases against the clinic, many of them wanted to get
embryos out. We had to do a lot of work
to try and get embryo shipping happening to other countries,
and that was complicated because of the rules in Greece
(16:26):
around embryo export. So it ended up being a really
difficult lesson for people around the risks of cross border
reproductive care. You can't be on the ground looking at
what these planks are doing, and they'd pulled the wall
over the eyes of so many people.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Seeing the fallout from the closure of the Mediterranean Fertility
Institute made Sam re examine his own experience with the
fertility industry.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
I suddenly started questioning the kind of things that were
happening in India, and we'd done it all those years before.
I did organize some DNA testing for our daughters because
there are they look different.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Sam and his husband have teenage twin daughters born through
a surrogate in India. They'd been told the girls were
born from eggs from the same woman, but doubts had lingered.
Speaker 4 (17:19):
And yeah, so look we've got the DNA test done
it and sure enough we've been told they were the
same egdona, but the results so that they weren't. And look,
you know, it doesn't matter for us in terms of,
you know, loving our kids, but it's kind of weird
when a click tells you they've used one egdona and
you find out, well, no, they hadn't.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Once Sam and his family had the results, they discovered
they weren't alone.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
We suddenly started realizing we're talking to other parents who'd
done the same kind of tests and found the same
sort of thing, but the kids they'd had in the
same country were also different.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Genetically and Obviously, as you said, this doesn't change anything
about how you love your children. But what did it
feel like having that revelation and that surprise.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
It just felt like a betrial, a trial from the
abvy of Clinck's point of view in terms of you know,
not being honest, snopping open with us at the time
about how they were credit imbrush.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
While reporting the story, Vernon came across cases of egg
theft in many countries, including ones in India and Israel,
Italy and the US.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
What's interesting is that the cases we know about were
addressed in the courts. They were addressed with disciplinary committees
and medical boards, but for the most part they were
resolved with mirror slaps on the wrists of the doctors involved.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Vernon found that a doctor who stole eggs in Italy
was sentenced to jail time, which he ended up serving
under house arrest because he was in poor health. He says,
doctors accused of egg theft in Israel and India have
been able to continue with their careers. In August twenty
twenty three, Greek police arrested eight Mediterranean Fertility Institute staff members,
(19:08):
including the clinic's founding doctor and its scientific director. Both
remain in jail awaiting possible trial. The doctor's lawyer didn't
respond to a request for comment. The scientific director's lawyer
said in an email that a list of questions from
Bloomberg about the police case contained inaccuracies, but didn't specify
what they were. It's unclear what the consequences will ultimately
(19:32):
be for those involved, but for Maria the impact has
been severe. She told Vernon that finding out her eggs
had been stolen felt like a violation, like a rape.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Maria after her first reaction of thinking, my gosh, do
I have Do I have a biological child or children
that I don't know about, she started asking the questions
of the police and it started with do you know
who this woman is who got my eggs? And the
answer is yes they do. Do they know whether she
has had a child and the answer was that they
(20:08):
didn't know.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Maria says the police told her Greek privacy law forbade
them from giving her the name of the woman who
received her eggs, but they could give her something else,
a code.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Each woman who did IVF at this clinic was given
a code, a customer code, and.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
The police gave Maria her own code and the code
of the woman who received her eggs, and one day
Maria would like to meet her, but first they'd have
to find each other.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
She's hoping that there will be a way that she
can be connected to the woman who got her eggs
through some official mechanism. If there isn't, she thinks there
might be other ways. You know, you could set up
a Facebook group. You could say, you know, the Hanya
egg scandal group, and let's say you know egg egg
donor one, two three four seeking egg recipient, you know, five, six,
(21:01):
seven eight. So that's the sort of thing that she
thinks about practically, but in reality, what's haunting her and
she's you know, she's getting psychological help, is that her
child might someday meet and fall in love with that
child's half sibling. And she doesn't know whether this woman
(21:23):
who got her eggs is from Australia or the US,
or Canada or Italy or maybe Greece, and quite possibly
her own town. That if there is this other child,
that maybe that child is a is a schoolmate of
her of her child.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
While police have identified as many as seventy five cases
of egg theft at the Mediterranean Fertility Institute. A Greek
judicial source told Vernon the final count could be much higher,
and Vernon says the ramifications are profound, not just for
the women whose eggs were stolen, but also for the
(22:00):
women who received them.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
We've been talking about Maria, but what about the woman
who got her eggs. We're talking about scores of cases
just in this one investigation. What about all of those
women who may or may not be informed in the
near future that their children were conceived from stolen eggs.
(22:23):
What about all the women and families who went to
that clinic and aren't informed, who think, gosh, maybe I
got stolen eggs. You know, Maria says, you know these
if she has a child, you know, it's my child.
But it's not my child, it's this other woman's or
this other famili's child. But what's to stop someone like
(22:43):
Maria from trying to claim custody.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Vernon says cases like these lay there just how much
trust is involved with undergoing IVF and how easily that
trust can be exploited, Because he says, if a patient
can't trust her clinic, how can anyone who's done IVF
or used a donor egg be certain that they haven't
(23:07):
received a stolen egg or that someone else hasn't received theirs.
That was the second episode in The Human Egg Trade,
our special series about the booming global market for human eggs.
(23:27):
The next episode in the series follows one couple's globe
spanning journey to start a family and what it costs them.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
They call their sun a quarter million dollar baby, right.
They say, by the time they finished the process with him,
they'd spent about a quarter million dollars.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
And did they go into debt? They did go into debt.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Look for that episode the Friday after next. For more
in depth reporting on how the human egg has become
a precious resource traded around the world, read The Egg,
an investigation by Bloomberg BusinessWeek and The Big Take. You
can read The Egg on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot
com or in the January twenty twenty five issue of
(24:09):
Bloomberg BusinessWeek. This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News.
I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox.
It was edited by Tracy Samuelson, Lauren Etter, and Ken Armstrong,
who was fact checked by Adriannatapia and mixed and sound
designed by Alex Ugia and Jessica Beck. Our senior producer
is Naomi Shavin. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our
(24:33):
executive producer is Nicole Beamster. Board Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's
head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure
to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen
to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back next week.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. In early twenty twenty,
after a long struggle to get pregnant, Maria and her
husband started IVF, but Maria still considered herself lucky.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
She lives on the island of Crete in the town
called Hanya, where, much to her good fortune, one of
the most prominent fertility clinics had been set up a
couple decades earlier.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
That's Vernon Silver. He's an investigative reporter at Bloomberg, and
he traveled from his home base in Rome to Greece
to report this story. Maria is a pseudonym. She asked
us not to use her real name and didn't want
to be recorded. Her hometown of Hanya is a seaside
tourist destination with a close knit community famous for its
(00:55):
centuries old harbor. The clinic where Maria went is about
a ten minute walk from them. At harbor, it was
called the Mediterranean Fertility Institute, and it drew customers from
all over the world.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
In recent years, it had become a hub for customers
from Italy, or Australia or the US. So right there
in her backyard was a clinic that could provide exactly
what she and her husband needed to try to have
this baby.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
It all seemed pretty standard. The clinic did a procedure
to retrieve Maria's eggs. Staff fertilized them with her husband's
sperm and implanted an embryo. She told Vernon it took
three cycles of IVF, but finally it worked.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
She eventually did get pregnant and she had a child.
Her dream had come true.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Maria became a mother and for the next three years
she raised her baby, who grew into a toddler. Then,
one day in February twenty twenty four, she got a
call from the police.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
The police asker had come down to the police station
and she walked into the room and there were two
police officers and a third person who was a psychologist.
And when Maria saw the psychologist, her heart sunk. She knew,
she knew she was about to get bad news. They
(02:20):
sat her down, The four of them sat around a desk,
and they broke the news to her that their investigation
had found that her eggs had been stolen.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Stolen. She didn't donate them or sell them. She initially
didn't even know they'd been taken from her.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
When she had had her eggs harvested to make her
own child. People at this clinic, according to the police,
had secretly taken about half of those eggs and given
them to another woman.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
This is episode two of The Huge Human Egg Trade,
a special series from Bloomberg's investigations team and the Big
Take podcast about the booming global market for human eggs.
Bloomberg reporters across five continents and eleven countries have spent
the last year trying to understand how human eggs are
bought and sold around the world. They've shed light on
(03:21):
the thirty five billion dollar market for assisted reproduction, an
opaque market where regulations vary widely from country to country.
It's a patchwork that can push some people to travel
great distances in their quest for a child, and can
also create opportunities for bad actors looking for a cut
of the trade. Today, we zoom in on one clinic
(03:43):
in Greece where police have identified as many as seventy
five cases of egg theft. Seventy five cases where a
woman's eggs were allegedly taken without her consent and sold
or donated to another person. It's a story that shows
how the actions of one clinic can have ripple effects
around the world that can reverberate for decades, and it
(04:06):
reveals the unique ways that the fertility industry runs not
only on capital, but on trust. Will continue after the
break after a year of digging into the fertility industry,
(04:30):
Bloomberg's Vernon Silver says, the trade of human eggs behaves
much like the trade of any commodity.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Like any global commodity trade, where you ship things, where
you invest, where you go for the best deal, depends
on regulations and prices, and it's kind of like squeezing
a water balloon, where if there's pressure at one place,
you know everybody's going to go somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
In recent years, as other fertility hotspots like India and
Thailand tighten their regulations, and after Russia began its full
scale invasion of Ukraine, Vernon says, some of that trade
shifted to Greece. If you're a couple or a person
needing a fertility treatment, what is the pitch that Greece
(05:16):
gives to them.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Greece has positioned itself, along with other countries that have
nice beaches, as a location for medical tourism, which applies
to fertility treatments. When it comes to eggs and the
other services like surrogacy an IVF its prices are lower
than in the United States, for example. In other Western countries.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
The country's legal framework is another selling point.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
There are a lot of restrictions in a lot of
countries that make it harder to do IVF or to
get a donor egg in a country like Italy, for example,
or Australia, and those restrictions are much less in Greece.
Combination of legal framework, money access and you know, a
(06:05):
friendly accepting economy based really from the government that wants
to promote this sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
And nice beaches and nice.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Beaches, I mean. Part of what happens when you are
seeking a fertility treatment, especially if it involves you know,
a donor egg, is somebody will travel, let's say, with
her husband to Greece, go to the clinic. The husband
will provide a sperm sample that will be used to
fertilize the donor egg. They wait around on the beach
in a nice hotel, have a good meal while the
(06:35):
wife is being prepared to have this growing embryo implanted
in her. And so it's always good to have a
nice place to do this that's pleasant and hang out
and cost effective.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Vernon says Greece's fertility industry has another geographic advantage proximity
to Eastern Europe.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Borders on poorer Eastern European countries, where there are women
who might want to be paid for their eggs and
also to be surrogates, which is a related industry in
the fertility industry.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Women from countries like Georgia and Bulgaria, who Vernon says,
are often motivated to sell their eggs because it pays
more than many other kinds of work, but that dynamic
has created opportunities for abuse.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Going back a decade, there had been a series of
busts by the Greek authorities, mostly in the northern city
of Thessaloniki, where they had tried to crack down on
people being pressured or manipulated or trafficked into giving up
their eggs. And so while Greece is not the biggest
(07:41):
market for eggs, you have Ukraine, you have Spain, which
are sort of massive hubs for egg banks, and that
sort of thing. You had some of the worst behavior
already being exposed in Greece.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
The clinic where Maria went the Mediterranean Fertility institute had
been on the radar of Greek regulators for years. In
twenty nineteen, the Greek agency overseeing medically assisted reproduction sent
a team of inspectors to the clinic to look into
a complaint about its surrogacy program. The team ultimately voted
to suspend the clinic's license for improper record keeping, but
(08:16):
the suspension went unenforced and the clinic remained open. It
would take another four years before Greek authorities were once
again at its door.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
A few months before the police invited Mario over to
break her the bad news about her own eggs. There
had been a bust and this had to do with
surrogacy and other issues, not egg theft yet, and because
of that bust, the clinic shutdown.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
The police told Vernon they were once again looking into
the clinic surrogacy practices, but once they got inside, they
found evidence of other kinds of crime.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
What the police had found in their investigation of this
clinic was that there were these handwritten records that showed
on a certain day, an IVF patient like Maria would
have her eggs removed and they would say how many
there were, and on that same day, about half that
many showed up in these handwritten records as being donations
to another woman of fresh eggs, meaning non frozen eggs,
(09:16):
eggs that had been extracted that day, and if that
woman had been the only person who had come in
to get her eggs removed, the police were fairly confident
that they could conclude that that exact match. For example,
twelve eggs removed from patient A and then six given
as a donation to patient B, and six made use
(09:38):
of by patient A the original one. That all added
up to them literally siphoning off half of the eggs
for somebody else.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
The police also found that the clinic had a consent
for him with a box that patients could check if
they were willing to donate some of their unused embryos
eggs that were successfully fertilized. And when the police sat
down with Maria, they really wanted to ask her about
that piece of paperwork.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
What they wanted to know from Maria was had she
consented to this quote.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Donation and had she She.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Said she definitely did not. In fact, she remembered the
consent form that she signed, and she said, you know,
this consent form had a box to tick about donating
any unused embryos which she did not tick, and nothing
about donating any excess eggs, and so at that point,
(10:30):
as it would turn out that she was one of
scores of women who were getting similar calls with the
police telling them the same thing and wanting to know
the same basic question, did you consent to this? Because
the records we have found showed that half of your
eggs went to somebody else.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
If you're a woman in Maria's position, leaving the clinic
that day and the police never call you, how would
you ever know that your eggs had been stolen?
Speaker 2 (10:58):
You would never know. Possibly you could know later on,
you know, if somebody did a twenty three and me test,
or if you walk down the street and saw someone
who looked a lot like your own kid. I mean,
there are ways conceivably to find out.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
A DNA test, a gut feeling, but in the moment,
it's impossible to know. That's because a woman undergoing an
egg retrievrole is typically given anesthesia. It's only after she
comes to that she's told exactly how many eggs were collected.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
But the really haunting aspect of all of this is
that if the police hadn't been doing an investigation of
this clinic, which they were doing for other reasons. If
that hadn't happened, she likely would never have been called
to the police station and been told this information, and she.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Might never know when we come back, what happened to
the eggs and embryos stored at the Mediterranean Fertility Institute
when it suddenly shut down, and what the fallout of
the investigation has meant for the women whose eggs were stolen.
(12:11):
Earlier this year, Bloomberg's Vernon Silver went to visit a
secure room at Khanya General Hospital on the Greek island
of Crete. He was there to see the genetic material
that authorities had seized from the Mediterranean Fertility Institute without sansos.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Is it top secret? Can I take a picture?
Speaker 4 (12:30):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
A doctor punched a passcode into a keypad and unlocked
the door to the climate controlled room.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
It's nice and cold, nice and colored, of course.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Inside, they showed Vernon the six rounded metal containers that
were lined up against a wall.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
It looks like R two D two from Star Wars.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
The canisters looked like a cross between an ancient Greek
amphora and a propane tank. Rounded metal containers with wheels
on the bottom and two handles on top. The lids
were fitted with handwritten labels and temperature monitors in these.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Things here they so this is an expensive operation because
you also have this thing that goes down. What is that?
That's the ice.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
The canisters were filled with liquid nitrogen and between the
six of them all the genetic material that had been
seized from the Mediterranean Fertility Institute. In total, they contained
the eggs, embryos, and sperm of about nine hundred people.
But Vernon says the canisters represent only part of the
(13:39):
chaos that ensued from the clinic's closure.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Really heartbreaking chaos, because this is a clinic that had
stored embryos and eggs and hired surrogates to carry people's
babies for them. So they were dealing with everything from
frozen eggs and embryos, to pregnant women to babies who
had to literally be sorted out with DNA test.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
In the early morning hours of August eighth, twenty twenty three,
when police descended on the Mediterranean Fertility Institute, the clinic
was working with a number of pregnant surrogates, and after
it was abruptly shut down. The Kanya General Hospital took
over their care and the care of the seventeen babies
they gave birth to. It would take eight months and
(14:29):
DNA testing to match them to their families and determine custody.
Vernon says what to do with the genetic material inside
the canisters was another piece of the puzzle. Some of
it came from local clients like Maria, some of it
had come from Ukrainian cryobanks, whose staff sent it out
of the country for safe keeping after Russia invaded, and
(14:52):
some of it had come from the clinic's foreign clients.
The embryologists charged with caring for them told Vernon the
ca canisters contained frozen eggs and embryos from about one
hundred and twenty five people who had come from outside Greece.
Some of those people had traveled from as far away
as India and Australia to use the clinic services, and
(15:14):
some were clients of Sam Everingham.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
So parents were contacting me saying, look way here for
the birth of that child, but no one's here. The
staff of all gone. They're in gile wirestock.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Sam is the founder of Growing Families Global. Its mission
is to support and inform people looking for safe, ethical
fertility services. He says people often reach out to his
organization when they can't source surrogates or donors in their
own countries and are hoping to find information about options overseas.
(15:51):
Representatives from the Mediterranean Fertility Institute had spoken at events
his organization hosted in Australia. He'd even gone to visit
the facility himself, and he says he was shocked when
he heard what had gone wrong there.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Oh, it was horrifying. Yeah, it was really tough. We
had to get them in touch with the Greek lawyers
to help out there. Some of them wanted to take
cases against the clinic, many of them wanted to get
embryos out. We had to do a lot of work
to try and get embryo shipping happening to other countries,
and that was complicated because of the rules in Greece
(16:26):
around embryo export. So it ended up being a really
difficult lesson for people around the risks of cross border
reproductive care. You can't be on the ground looking at
what these planks are doing, and they'd pulled the wall
over the eyes of so many people.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Seeing the fallout from the closure of the Mediterranean Fertility
Institute made Sam re examine his own experience with the
fertility industry.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
I suddenly started questioning the kind of things that were
happening in India, and we'd done it all those years before.
I did organize some DNA testing for our daughters because
there are they look different.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Sam and his husband have teenage twin daughters born through
a surrogate in India. They'd been told the girls were
born from eggs from the same woman, but doubts had lingered.
Speaker 4 (17:19):
And yeah, so look we've got the DNA test done
it and sure enough we've been told they were the
same egdona, but the results so that they weren't. And look,
you know, it doesn't matter for us in terms of,
you know, loving our kids, but it's kind of weird
when a click tells you they've used one egdona and
you find out, well, no, they hadn't.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Once Sam and his family had the results, they discovered
they weren't alone.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
We suddenly started realizing we're talking to other parents who'd
done the same kind of tests and found the same
sort of thing, but the kids they'd had in the
same country were also different.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Genetically and Obviously, as you said, this doesn't change anything
about how you love your children. But what did it
feel like having that revelation and that surprise.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
It just felt like a betrial, a trial from the
abvy of Clinck's point of view in terms of you know,
not being honest, snopping open with us at the time
about how they were credit imbrush.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
While reporting the story, Vernon came across cases of egg
theft in many countries, including ones in India and Israel,
Italy and the US.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
What's interesting is that the cases we know about were
addressed in the courts. They were addressed with disciplinary committees
and medical boards, but for the most part they were
resolved with mirror slaps on the wrists of the doctors involved.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Vernon found that a doctor who stole eggs in Italy
was sentenced to jail time, which he ended up serving
under house arrest because he was in poor health. He says,
doctors accused of egg theft in Israel and India have
been able to continue with their careers. In August twenty
twenty three, Greek police arrested eight Mediterranean Fertility Institute staff members,
(19:08):
including the clinic's founding doctor and its scientific director. Both
remain in jail awaiting possible trial. The doctor's lawyer didn't
respond to a request for comment. The scientific director's lawyer
said in an email that a list of questions from
Bloomberg about the police case contained inaccuracies, but didn't specify
what they were. It's unclear what the consequences will ultimately
(19:32):
be for those involved, but for Maria the impact has
been severe. She told Vernon that finding out her eggs
had been stolen felt like a violation, like a rape.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Maria after her first reaction of thinking, my gosh, do
I have Do I have a biological child or children
that I don't know about, she started asking the questions
of the police and it started with do you know
who this woman is who got my eggs? And the
answer is yes they do. Do they know whether she
has had a child and the answer was that they
(20:08):
didn't know.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Maria says the police told her Greek privacy law forbade
them from giving her the name of the woman who
received her eggs, but they could give her something else,
a code.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Each woman who did IVF at this clinic was given
a code, a customer code, and.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
The police gave Maria her own code and the code
of the woman who received her eggs, and one day
Maria would like to meet her, but first they'd have
to find each other.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
She's hoping that there will be a way that she
can be connected to the woman who got her eggs
through some official mechanism. If there isn't, she thinks there
might be other ways. You know, you could set up
a Facebook group. You could say, you know, the Hanya
egg scandal group, and let's say you know egg egg
donor one, two three four seeking egg recipient, you know, five, six,
(21:01):
seven eight. So that's the sort of thing that she
thinks about practically, but in reality, what's haunting her and
she's you know, she's getting psychological help, is that her
child might someday meet and fall in love with that
child's half sibling. And she doesn't know whether this woman
(21:23):
who got her eggs is from Australia or the US,
or Canada or Italy or maybe Greece, and quite possibly
her own town. That if there is this other child,
that maybe that child is a is a schoolmate of
her of her child.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
While police have identified as many as seventy five cases
of egg theft at the Mediterranean Fertility Institute. A Greek
judicial source told Vernon the final count could be much higher,
and Vernon says the ramifications are profound, not just for
the women whose eggs were stolen, but also for the
(22:00):
women who received them.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
We've been talking about Maria, but what about the woman
who got her eggs. We're talking about scores of cases
just in this one investigation. What about all of those
women who may or may not be informed in the
near future that their children were conceived from stolen eggs.
(22:23):
What about all the women and families who went to
that clinic and aren't informed, who think, gosh, maybe I
got stolen eggs. You know, Maria says, you know these
if she has a child, you know, it's my child.
But it's not my child, it's this other woman's or
this other famili's child. But what's to stop someone like
(22:43):
Maria from trying to claim custody.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Vernon says cases like these lay there just how much
trust is involved with undergoing IVF and how easily that
trust can be exploited, Because he says, if a patient
can't trust her clinic, how can anyone who's done IVF
or used a donor egg be certain that they haven't
(23:07):
received a stolen egg or that someone else hasn't received theirs.
That was the second episode in The Human Egg Trade,
our special series about the booming global market for human eggs.
(23:27):
The next episode in the series follows one couple's globe
spanning journey to start a family and what it costs them.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
They call their sun a quarter million dollar baby, right.
They say, by the time they finished the process with him,
they'd spent about a quarter million dollars.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
And did they go into debt? They did go into debt.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Look for that episode the Friday after next. For more
in depth reporting on how the human egg has become
a precious resource traded around the world, read The Egg,
an investigation by Bloomberg BusinessWeek and The Big Take. You
can read The Egg on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot
com or in the January twenty twenty five issue of
(24:09):
Bloomberg BusinessWeek. This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News.
I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox.
It was edited by Tracy Samuelson, Lauren Etter, and Ken Armstrong,
who was fact checked by Adriannatapia and mixed and sound
designed by Alex Ugia and Jessica Beck. Our senior producer
is Naomi Shavin. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our
(24:33):
executive producer is Nicole Beamster. Board Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's
head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure
to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen
to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back next week.
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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