April 29, 2025 • 24 mins
A 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 is joined by Bloomberg’s Natalie Obiko Pearson to unpack an investigation in India that revealed how far some people will go to get a cut of this trade, even if it means exploiting a child.
Read more: The Egg
Listen to the rest of the series:The Human Egg Trade: Episode 2 - The Theft
The Human Egg Trade: Episode 3 - The Journey
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Hi Wanha Here. This week we're airing the first episode
of a special series from Bloomberg's investigations team and The
Big Take podcast. It's an in depth look at the
global trade in human eggs. A batch of human eggs
is extracted from a woman somewhere on the planet roughly
every fifteen seconds, and as the demand for these eggs
(00:29):
has grown, so has the potential for exploitation and even theft.
So to understand this market, Bloomberg reporters across the globe
spent a year talking to people who are at the
center of this booming industry that harvests from the bodies
of women and sometimes even girls. The three part series
was first published in The Big Take podcast in December,
(00:51):
and we'll be publishing the second and third episodes this week.
Make sure to subscribe to The Big Take Asia to
hear them when they're out. Here's our first episode.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
This story starts with a young girl in India, barely
a teenager who loves doing hair and makeup and helping
her mom put on her sorry. When she grows up,
she'd like to become a beautician, and in twenty twenty three.
She wanted what so many teens around the world want,
a smartphone, and was a phone vihe Nakha. The girl
(01:26):
says that like everyone in her generation, she loves using phones.
She'd asked her mom for one, but her mom said
the family couldn't afford it. Then she heard about a
way she could make the money herself. And because of
what it involved and for reasons that will soon become clear,
the girl and her family have asked that we not
use her name. The idea came from someone she trusted,
(01:52):
zeik Mirda mohleki Chachi means aunt in Hindi. It's what
the girl called her grandmother's neighbor. The woman's name is Sema.
We're not using her last name because it could help
identify the girl. And Sema knew a way the girl
(02:13):
could get the money for a phone, but if she
went through with it, she wasn't allowed to tell her mom.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
The girl said that Sema didn't really explain what it was.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
She has said herself.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
You know, I'm a kid like I didn't really understand
what was being done to me or what was going
to happen to me.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
That's Natalie Obiko Pearson. She's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg
who was based in India for many years.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
Sema just told her this is how you can make
fifteen thousand rupees really quick, and so she was like, okay,
I'll go along with it.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Fifteen thousand rupees is about one hundred and eighty US dollars.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
It might be more than what her mother makes in
a month, so it's a lot of money in her world.
But again, she had no idea what she was getting into.
All she wanted was a phone and it ended up
having these consequences that she never could have imagined.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
She'd agreed to sell her ex In doing so, she
was pulled into a global industry that's boomed in the
last twenty years, especially within India.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
Fertility is a big business everywhere, but especially in India
just because of the size of the market there and
global money has been pouring into that market. And there
are parts of India where you would walk along a
single street and there would be like four or five
fertility clinics there that had cropped up within the span
of a few years. The analogy that everybody use is
(03:40):
like they were like mushrooms. Once they began to grow.
They just began cropping up everywhere.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Today on the show The Human Egg Trade, a special
series from Bloomberg's investigations team, and the Big Take podcast.
Well IVF or in vitro fertilization has been around since
the nineteen seventies. Early success rates were low, but over
the last two decades, advancements in technology and funding from
(04:08):
the biggest investment banks and private equity firms have made
it possible for the fertility industry to flourish. Now, a
batch of human eggs is extracted from a woman somewhere
on the planet roughly every fifteen seconds. Most are from
women who plan to use those eggs themselves, but at
least six percent come from women who donate their eggs.
(04:31):
That's the fertility industry's term donate, though in reality many
of these women are paid. Bloomberg reporters across the globe
have spent the last year trying to understand this new
booming market for human eggs. The stories they found shed
light on a supply chain where the prize commodity is
harvested not from fields, fisheries, or mines, but from the
(04:55):
bodies of women and even girls. It's a global and
opaque mart where a demand is so great that even
where regulations are in place, there are powerful incentives to
evade them. That's been the case in India, where our
series starts, and where the story of One Girl shows
how far some people will go to get a cut
of this trade, even if it means exploiting a child.
(05:19):
Our story starts after the break. Bloomberg's Natalie Obiko Pearson
says there are a few reasons why India is seen
as the de facto capital of the fertility industry.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
One is because the sheer size of the population makes
the global IVF market there extremely large.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
The other reason is cultural.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
There's an incredible amount of pressure on women to give
birth in India, like as soon as you get married,
the pressure begins of like when are you going to
get pregnant? When are you going to bring us a
sun And that drives the egg donation market because couples
there are often willing to maybe just try like one
cycle off and then if they don't get pregnant, will
immediately opt for a donor egg. And it was such
(06:05):
a striking phenomenon that a couple IVF doctors actually said
it took them by surprise. At first, they would have
thought that people would have opted to go for a
few more cycles, you know, wanting their children to have
their own genetic makeup. But they were like, no, the
pressure and the expense was so much that they were like,
let's just go to donation straightway.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
In other words, a couple might bet that buying another
woman's eggs could give them a quicker path to a
successful pregnancy. Natalie says fertility clinics in India serve a
wide range of customers, people from all parts of the country,
all around the world, and from all walks of life.
But she says the typical donor has a much narrower profile.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
It's less privileged women coming from marginalized communities. I mean,
if you just think about the actual procedure of an
egg donation, it's an incredibly invasive procedure. It requires days
of hormones, you have to go under general anesthesia to
have the eggs existed. So what person is going to
do that? Completely altruistically? Right, Like, the people who are
(07:06):
doing it are usually doing it because they need money,
and so that means that most of the donors are
coming from poorer neighborhoods.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
And more vulnerable backgrounds. In twenty twenty one, after sixteen years,
eight drafts and three parliamentary studies, Indian lawmakers passed the
country's first regulations regarding egg donations. The new law created
a national registry of fertility clinics. It also made it
illegal to sell eggs, though the industry still manages to
(07:35):
pay donors by compensating for related costs like their time
and travel, and it also made it illegal for anyone
under twenty three years old to donate.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
Anecdotally, you hear that egg donations dropped off quite a
bit after the law came in, just because a lot
of people didn't want to be on the wrong side
of the law, and maybe it got more difficult source donors.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
At least to source those donors. Legally, the law was
supposed to prevent egg donations from underage girls, but Natalie
says it's still fairly common. They're often brought in by
people like Sema, people known in the industry as agents.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
They're not employed by any particular company or clinic. They're
out there and they're in the neighborhoods trying to source
women to donate, or rather sell their eggs, and so
these are often former egg donors themselves, or they might
be a cleaner at a hospital. It might be a
woman in the neighborhood who is also sourcing blood donations
(08:36):
and kidney donations and the like. And so word travels
along the grapevine and a lot of less privileged neighborhoods
that this is one way to make some fast cash
if you need it.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
The girl's family comes from one of the lowest tiers
in India's cast system. She says her father isn't around much,
her mother's parents help them get by, so the money
Seema offered the girl for her eggs was tempting. Once
she signed on, the plan unfolded over two weeks. It
(09:07):
started with shots.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
So it was ten days of visiting the clinic and
going four hormones shots to stimulate her ovaries to produce
the eggs. She was doing this all in secret from
her family, so she did talk about how she was
getting really sick of it at the end, and Sema
was having to sort of cajole her and make sure
she attended her appointments. And you know, I've undergone IVF myself.
(09:32):
I know what those hormone shots are like and they
can really really mess with you. You end up feeling
incredibly bloated, Your emotions are all over the place.
Speaker 5 (09:41):
It can be painful at times.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
To the extent that you know, did she have any
doubts during that process.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
I think there were moments where she was like, Oh,
I'm done with this, this is like too much.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
But the girl told Natalie that by that point, Sema
said it was too late.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
Sema was like, no, you can't back out. You're going
to your appointments. You know, we're spending money on you
to receive these medications, so you're going to go.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
The girl was about thirteen years old, though her family
isn't sure of her exact birthday. That meant that what
she was preparing to do was illegal. So on the
morning of her retrieval, Sema helped the girl disguise her age.
They started with her outfit.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Once her mother left the home, the girl got up
and she had been told to wear a sari. So
the girl typically wears what we call some of archamza's
in India. They're kind of like a tunic and it
can make a slim body look very slim. The sari
was intended to make her look older, curvier like an adult.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
The girl met Sima outside the clinic. Another woman was
with her, an agent named Anita. The girl told Natalie
it was Anita who had arranged the fake id, and
the girl says the two women had a few more
tricks to make her look older before she went inside.
But the Awadani about the think.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
They began putting on all of these sort of accessories
that signify a married woman in India, so like a
vermilion bindi on the forehead and a Mongol Sutra wedding necklace,
and then they had a toddler ready for her. So
they had lied to the clinic and said that she
had already given birth twice, and so she was given
a fake child to take into the clinic with her.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Did the people in the clinic believe that she was
who she said she was and she was as old
as she said she.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
Was, Well, that's one of the things, right, I mean,
clearly some red flags did go up. The doctors who
were counseling her before the procedure. At one point they
asked Sema to leave the room because they wanted to
hear from the girl herself. And then they were like, Okay,
why are you doing this? How many children have you had?
Speaker 3 (11:45):
The girl says she answered those questions the way Sema
had coached her. If the doctors were skeptical, they didn't
stop the procedure from going forward. They wheeled the girl
into the operating room, put her under anesthesia, and started
the retrieval.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
They take a really really long needle and they push
it up your vagina and they go to the ovaries
where follicles have been developing. And so the follicles, probably
dozens of them in many cases, are about half an
inch long, and they put the needle in there and
they aspirate the egg out, so they sort of like
suck it out, and they pull these out and they
put them into a dish.
Speaker 5 (12:21):
It's usually quite quick. It's over in about ten minutes.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
The girl says she woke up from the procedure feeling woozy.
She was in pain, her stomach hurt, and she was
alone theater.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
When she comes to she's like, nobody's there, the doctor's gone,
nobody's talking to me.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Just make it. Man says thirty, yeah, Tombulnkan giant.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
She sees a nurse She's like, can I go and
the nurse's like, yeah, sure, So she gets up and
leaves and she walks out of the clinic. Anita goes
to an atm nearby, pulls out fifteen thousand rupees, hands
it to Sema. Seema makes her cut, gives eleven thy
six hundred rupees to the girl and goes immediately to
buy her phone.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
After the girl bought her phone, she tried to hide
it from her mom, but her secret didn't stay secret
for long. Coming up how that secret was exposed and
how the girl's story connects to some of the biggest
financial players in the world, Bloomberg's Natalie Obico Pearson went
(13:37):
to see the clinic where the girl's eggs were retrieved.
It's part of a chain which is one of the
biggest in India. It's called Nova IVF Fertility.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Walking up to the Nova IVF clinic.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
It's on a busy street in Varanasi, a city of
a few million on the banks of the Ganges River
in northern India. From the outside, the clinic looks more
office building than.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
Hospital, big glass building with sort of blue reflective windows,
modern and there's like an eyeglasses shop on the bottom,
which is selling designer sunglasses for more than the girl
got paid for eggs.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
The building is also covered with billboards. Our colleague at
VET Pelipu helped Natalie translate them from Hindi.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
West to become a mother and father.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Stock your Jourdan, your mother and father road scot your journey.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
To become another product here. Nova IVF has had some
big name investors.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
Its growth was funded by Western financiers. You know, Goldman
Sachs was one of its very early investors. It was
set up by a US based private equity firm. Today
it's owned by TPG, another private equity firm.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
The rush to cash in on India's fertility industry has
ramped up in recent years.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
I'd say in the last maybe like five to eight
years or so five to ten years. That's where you've
seen sort of like the really big money, really sophisticated
investors coming in, so Silicon Valley investors, private equity firms,
banks coming in and taking stakes in local IVF chains,
expanding them.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
All of that business has created more competition among clinics
and also among agents, and that's actually how the girl's
secret was exposed.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
Seema and another agent end up getting into a quarrel
on the street over the girl. The other agent is
accusing Sema of having stolen a client, and one of
the girl's relatives overhears this quarrel, and so word goes
back through her family, eventually back to her mom, and
her mom confronts the girl and says, sees the phone
and that's when things sort of like explode.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
How cool.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
The girl's mother says that she was angry when she
found out what her daughter had done sublo, but since
everyone was already starting to gossip, she didn't want to
pile on. She says, what had been lost was lost,
(16:19):
so as a mother, her job was to make sure
something was done about it.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
So the mom confronts Sema. She ends up filing a
police complaint.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
The girl's mother says even now she doesn't fully understand
what was done to her daughter, and Natalie says her
confusion shows in that police complaint she filed.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
When her mother first went to the police and filed
the complaint, she wrote down something like, you know, something
has happened to my daughter. She's still a virgin, like
please help me, this is terrible and so it you know,
egg donations sort of get conflated with sex and maybe
sexual assault and the kind of implications that can have
for a woman in Indian society. Violation a violation, and
(17:11):
it sparked the kind of questions that really are are
are the worst question that an Indian woman can face,
is you know, is she going to be able to
have children? So people don't understand this procedure, they're asking
in the streets, their gossiping, is she ever going to
be able to have kids?
Speaker 3 (17:29):
The complaint sparked an investigation.
Speaker 5 (17:32):
The medical officers report was pretty explicit.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
It said this could not have happened without the cooperation
of the clinic and its employees, and yet police never
seemed to follow that lead. They arrested the five low
level people and then never ended up going back to
the clinic and holding any of them accountable.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Seema was among those arrested and has since been released
on bail. Anita, the woman who helped secure the girl's
fake ID, was also arrested, along with three men. The
doctors and staff at Nova IVF, the clinic that performed
the retrieval, have not been named in the case.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
What Nova said to us, they said look like We
do our best to ensure that cases like this don't happen,
but to some degree our hands are tied, like it's
not our expertise to try and weed out fake IDs.
This is where the government has to bring in biometric
verifications so that this kind of thing doesn't happen, and
we would be the first people to adopt it.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Goldman Sachs is no longer an investor in Nova IVF
and a client to comment. TPG, the private equity group
currently backing the clinic, deferred comment to Nova. Nova also
said that they've been lobbying the Indian government to mandate
more stringent ways of verifying donors' identities and ages, but
they say the government has not responded. After word got
(18:57):
out in the girl's community that she had sold her
eggs to buy a phone, the stigma she faced was severe.
Comment The girl says there are people who call her names,
who scorn and taunt her. Government questions why people are
(19:21):
only blaming her and not blaming the adults involved. Nation
blamed it. Blame this is, she says. People keep talking
(19:50):
about it, but no one asks her why she did
what she did. She says she knows she made a mistake.
Napos Gislio, are you.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
He?
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Eliza Nicols?
Speaker 4 (20:06):
She had no idea what she was getting into. All
she wanted was a phone and it ended up having
these consequences that she never could have imagined.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
So she's dropped out of school.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
You know, in stigma in close knit communities like the
ones that she lives in is something very difficult to
escape from.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Natalie says, while the girl's story may seem extreme, it's
not that unusual in India, one of the world's largest
markets for donor eggs. But the same forces that swept
up the girl, great demand and great opportunity for profit
are not limited to India. They're present wherever the human
egg trade happens, and as the market has grown, so
(20:48):
has the potential for corruption and exploitation.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
To me, fundamentally, it's about the commodification of women's body
and the commercialization of production. So big investors are in
this for the money, and we know the kind of
returns that private equity tends to expect.
Speaker 5 (21:10):
In their investments.
Speaker 4 (21:12):
I think it's a story of what happens when you
have tremendous growth and tremendous demand without guardrails. Just the
infrastructure and the regulations and the ability to enforce is
not there in India to make sure that procedures like
this happen ethically. And I think that's something that I
(21:33):
want people to think about when they come away from
the story. If you're ever in the position where you
need a donated egg, to think about where is that
coming from and how can you be sure that it
was sourced sustainably.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
That was the first episode in The Human Egg Trade,
our special series about the booming global market for human
eggs and the people whose lives are swept up in it.
The next episode in the series takes us to Greece,
where this intense demand sets the stage for a crime
with profound consequences.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
So Maria was lucky. She eventually did get pregnant and
she had a child. And last year the police asked
he 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
(22:33):
Maria saw the psychologist, her heart sunk. She knew she
was about to get bad news. They sat her down
and they broke the news to her that their investigation
had found that her eggs had been stolen.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
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,
which spans five continents and eleven countries. You can read
The Egg on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot Com or
in the January twenty twenty five issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
(23:15):
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. It was
fact checked by Adriana Tapia and mixed and sound designed
by Alex Sugia and Jessica Beck. Special thanks to Ed Vett, Pealipu,
Vicki Fung Need Two, Suda mohandas Bloomberg Originals, and Pratish Narayanan.
(23:40):
Our senior producer is Naomi shaven, Our senior editor is
Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamsterrobor Sage Bauman
is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. If you like 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.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Hi Wanha Here. This week we're airing the first episode
of a special series from Bloomberg's investigations team and The
Big Take podcast. It's an in depth look at the
global trade in human eggs. A batch of human eggs
is extracted from a woman somewhere on the planet roughly
every fifteen seconds, and as the demand for these eggs
(00:29):
has grown, so has the potential for exploitation and even theft.
So to understand this market, Bloomberg reporters across the globe
spent a year talking to people who are at the
center of this booming industry that harvests from the bodies
of women and sometimes even girls. The three part series
was first published in The Big Take podcast in December,
(00:51):
and we'll be publishing the second and third episodes this week.
Make sure to subscribe to The Big Take Asia to
hear them when they're out. Here's our first episode.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
This story starts with a young girl in India, barely
a teenager who loves doing hair and makeup and helping
her mom put on her sorry. When she grows up,
she'd like to become a beautician, and in twenty twenty three.
She wanted what so many teens around the world want,
a smartphone, and was a phone vihe Nakha. The girl
(01:26):
says that like everyone in her generation, she loves using phones.
She'd asked her mom for one, but her mom said
the family couldn't afford it. Then she heard about a
way she could make the money herself. And because of
what it involved and for reasons that will soon become clear,
the girl and her family have asked that we not
use her name. The idea came from someone she trusted,
(01:52):
zeik Mirda mohleki Chachi means aunt in Hindi. It's what
the girl called her grandmother's neighbor. The woman's name is Sema.
We're not using her last name because it could help
identify the girl. And Sema knew a way the girl
(02:13):
could get the money for a phone, but if she
went through with it, she wasn't allowed to tell her mom.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
The girl said that Sema didn't really explain what it was.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
She has said herself.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
You know, I'm a kid like I didn't really understand
what was being done to me or what was going
to happen to me.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
That's Natalie Obiko Pearson. She's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg
who was based in India for many years.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
Sema just told her this is how you can make
fifteen thousand rupees really quick, and so she was like, okay,
I'll go along with it.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Fifteen thousand rupees is about one hundred and eighty US dollars.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
It might be more than what her mother makes in
a month, so it's a lot of money in her world.
But again, she had no idea what she was getting into.
All she wanted was a phone and it ended up
having these consequences that she never could have imagined.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
She'd agreed to sell her ex In doing so, she
was pulled into a global industry that's boomed in the
last twenty years, especially within India.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
Fertility is a big business everywhere, but especially in India
just because of the size of the market there and
global money has been pouring into that market. And there
are parts of India where you would walk along a
single street and there would be like four or five
fertility clinics there that had cropped up within the span
of a few years. The analogy that everybody use is
(03:40):
like they were like mushrooms. Once they began to grow.
They just began cropping up everywhere.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Today on the show The Human Egg Trade, a special
series from Bloomberg's investigations team, and the Big Take podcast.
Well IVF or in vitro fertilization has been around since
the nineteen seventies. Early success rates were low, but over
the last two decades, advancements in technology and funding from
(04:08):
the biggest investment banks and private equity firms have made
it possible for the fertility industry to flourish. Now, a
batch of human eggs is extracted from a woman somewhere
on the planet roughly every fifteen seconds. Most are from
women who plan to use those eggs themselves, but at
least six percent come from women who donate their eggs.
(04:31):
That's the fertility industry's term donate, though in reality many
of these women are paid. Bloomberg reporters across the globe
have spent the last year trying to understand this new
booming market for human eggs. The stories they found shed
light on a supply chain where the prize commodity is
harvested not from fields, fisheries, or mines, but from the
(04:55):
bodies of women and even girls. It's a global and
opaque mart where a demand is so great that even
where regulations are in place, there are powerful incentives to
evade them. That's been the case in India, where our
series starts, and where the story of One Girl shows
how far some people will go to get a cut
of this trade, even if it means exploiting a child.
(05:19):
Our story starts after the break. Bloomberg's Natalie Obiko Pearson
says there are a few reasons why India is seen
as the de facto capital of the fertility industry.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
One is because the sheer size of the population makes
the global IVF market there extremely large.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
The other reason is cultural.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
There's an incredible amount of pressure on women to give
birth in India, like as soon as you get married,
the pressure begins of like when are you going to
get pregnant? When are you going to bring us a
sun And that drives the egg donation market because couples
there are often willing to maybe just try like one
cycle off and then if they don't get pregnant, will
immediately opt for a donor egg. And it was such
(06:05):
a striking phenomenon that a couple IVF doctors actually said
it took them by surprise. At first, they would have
thought that people would have opted to go for a
few more cycles, you know, wanting their children to have
their own genetic makeup. But they were like, no, the
pressure and the expense was so much that they were like,
let's just go to donation straightway.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
In other words, a couple might bet that buying another
woman's eggs could give them a quicker path to a
successful pregnancy. Natalie says fertility clinics in India serve a
wide range of customers, people from all parts of the country,
all around the world, and from all walks of life.
But she says the typical donor has a much narrower profile.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
It's less privileged women coming from marginalized communities. I mean,
if you just think about the actual procedure of an
egg donation, it's an incredibly invasive procedure. It requires days
of hormones, you have to go under general anesthesia to
have the eggs existed. So what person is going to
do that? Completely altruistically? Right, Like, the people who are
(07:06):
doing it are usually doing it because they need money,
and so that means that most of the donors are
coming from poorer neighborhoods.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
And more vulnerable backgrounds. In twenty twenty one, after sixteen years,
eight drafts and three parliamentary studies, Indian lawmakers passed the
country's first regulations regarding egg donations. The new law created
a national registry of fertility clinics. It also made it
illegal to sell eggs, though the industry still manages to
(07:35):
pay donors by compensating for related costs like their time
and travel, and it also made it illegal for anyone
under twenty three years old to donate.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
Anecdotally, you hear that egg donations dropped off quite a
bit after the law came in, just because a lot
of people didn't want to be on the wrong side
of the law, and maybe it got more difficult source donors.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
At least to source those donors. Legally, the law was
supposed to prevent egg donations from underage girls, but Natalie
says it's still fairly common. They're often brought in by
people like Sema, people known in the industry as agents.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
They're not employed by any particular company or clinic. They're
out there and they're in the neighborhoods trying to source
women to donate, or rather sell their eggs, and so
these are often former egg donors themselves, or they might
be a cleaner at a hospital. It might be a
woman in the neighborhood who is also sourcing blood donations
(08:36):
and kidney donations and the like. And so word travels
along the grapevine and a lot of less privileged neighborhoods
that this is one way to make some fast cash
if you need it.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
The girl's family comes from one of the lowest tiers
in India's cast system. She says her father isn't around much,
her mother's parents help them get by, so the money
Seema offered the girl for her eggs was tempting. Once
she signed on, the plan unfolded over two weeks. It
(09:07):
started with shots.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
So it was ten days of visiting the clinic and
going four hormones shots to stimulate her ovaries to produce
the eggs. She was doing this all in secret from
her family, so she did talk about how she was
getting really sick of it at the end, and Sema
was having to sort of cajole her and make sure
she attended her appointments. And you know, I've undergone IVF myself.
(09:32):
I know what those hormone shots are like and they
can really really mess with you. You end up feeling
incredibly bloated, Your emotions are all over the place.
Speaker 5 (09:41):
It can be painful at times.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
To the extent that you know, did she have any
doubts during that process.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
I think there were moments where she was like, Oh,
I'm done with this, this is like too much.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
But the girl told Natalie that by that point, Sema
said it was too late.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
Sema was like, no, you can't back out. You're going
to your appointments. You know, we're spending money on you
to receive these medications, so you're going to go.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
The girl was about thirteen years old, though her family
isn't sure of her exact birthday. That meant that what
she was preparing to do was illegal. So on the
morning of her retrieval, Sema helped the girl disguise her age.
They started with her outfit.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Once her mother left the home, the girl got up
and she had been told to wear a sari. So
the girl typically wears what we call some of archamza's
in India. They're kind of like a tunic and it
can make a slim body look very slim. The sari
was intended to make her look older, curvier like an adult.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
The girl met Sima outside the clinic. Another woman was
with her, an agent named Anita. The girl told Natalie
it was Anita who had arranged the fake id, and
the girl says the two women had a few more
tricks to make her look older before she went inside.
But the Awadani about the think.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
They began putting on all of these sort of accessories
that signify a married woman in India, so like a
vermilion bindi on the forehead and a Mongol Sutra wedding necklace,
and then they had a toddler ready for her. So
they had lied to the clinic and said that she
had already given birth twice, and so she was given
a fake child to take into the clinic with her.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Did the people in the clinic believe that she was
who she said she was and she was as old
as she said she.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
Was, Well, that's one of the things, right, I mean,
clearly some red flags did go up. The doctors who
were counseling her before the procedure. At one point they
asked Sema to leave the room because they wanted to
hear from the girl herself. And then they were like, Okay,
why are you doing this? How many children have you had?
Speaker 3 (11:45):
The girl says she answered those questions the way Sema
had coached her. If the doctors were skeptical, they didn't
stop the procedure from going forward. They wheeled the girl
into the operating room, put her under anesthesia, and started
the retrieval.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
They take a really really long needle and they push
it up your vagina and they go to the ovaries
where follicles have been developing. And so the follicles, probably
dozens of them in many cases, are about half an
inch long, and they put the needle in there and
they aspirate the egg out, so they sort of like
suck it out, and they pull these out and they
put them into a dish.
Speaker 5 (12:21):
It's usually quite quick. It's over in about ten minutes.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
The girl says she woke up from the procedure feeling woozy.
She was in pain, her stomach hurt, and she was
alone theater.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
When she comes to she's like, nobody's there, the doctor's gone,
nobody's talking to me.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Just make it. Man says thirty, yeah, Tombulnkan giant.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
She sees a nurse She's like, can I go and
the nurse's like, yeah, sure, So she gets up and
leaves and she walks out of the clinic. Anita goes
to an atm nearby, pulls out fifteen thousand rupees, hands
it to Sema. Seema makes her cut, gives eleven thy
six hundred rupees to the girl and goes immediately to
buy her phone.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
After the girl bought her phone, she tried to hide
it from her mom, but her secret didn't stay secret
for long. Coming up how that secret was exposed and
how the girl's story connects to some of the biggest
financial players in the world, Bloomberg's Natalie Obico Pearson went
(13:37):
to see the clinic where the girl's eggs were retrieved.
It's part of a chain which is one of the
biggest in India. It's called Nova IVF Fertility.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Walking up to the Nova IVF clinic.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
It's on a busy street in Varanasi, a city of
a few million on the banks of the Ganges River
in northern India. From the outside, the clinic looks more
office building than.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
Hospital, big glass building with sort of blue reflective windows,
modern and there's like an eyeglasses shop on the bottom,
which is selling designer sunglasses for more than the girl
got paid for eggs.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
The building is also covered with billboards. Our colleague at
VET Pelipu helped Natalie translate them from Hindi.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
West to become a mother and father.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Stock your Jourdan, your mother and father road scot your journey.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
To become another product here. Nova IVF has had some
big name investors.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
Its growth was funded by Western financiers. You know, Goldman
Sachs was one of its very early investors. It was
set up by a US based private equity firm. Today
it's owned by TPG, another private equity firm.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
The rush to cash in on India's fertility industry has
ramped up in recent years.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
I'd say in the last maybe like five to eight
years or so five to ten years. That's where you've
seen sort of like the really big money, really sophisticated
investors coming in, so Silicon Valley investors, private equity firms,
banks coming in and taking stakes in local IVF chains,
expanding them.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
All of that business has created more competition among clinics
and also among agents, and that's actually how the girl's
secret was exposed.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
Seema and another agent end up getting into a quarrel
on the street over the girl. The other agent is
accusing Sema of having stolen a client, and one of
the girl's relatives overhears this quarrel, and so word goes
back through her family, eventually back to her mom, and
her mom confronts the girl and says, sees the phone
and that's when things sort of like explode.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
How cool.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
The girl's mother says that she was angry when she
found out what her daughter had done sublo, but since
everyone was already starting to gossip, she didn't want to
pile on. She says, what had been lost was lost,
(16:19):
so as a mother, her job was to make sure
something was done about it.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
So the mom confronts Sema. She ends up filing a
police complaint.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
The girl's mother says even now she doesn't fully understand
what was done to her daughter, and Natalie says her
confusion shows in that police complaint she filed.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
When her mother first went to the police and filed
the complaint, she wrote down something like, you know, something
has happened to my daughter. She's still a virgin, like
please help me, this is terrible and so it you know,
egg donations sort of get conflated with sex and maybe
sexual assault and the kind of implications that can have
for a woman in Indian society. Violation a violation, and
(17:11):
it sparked the kind of questions that really are are
are the worst question that an Indian woman can face,
is you know, is she going to be able to
have children? So people don't understand this procedure, they're asking
in the streets, their gossiping, is she ever going to
be able to have kids?
Speaker 3 (17:29):
The complaint sparked an investigation.
Speaker 5 (17:32):
The medical officers report was pretty explicit.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
It said this could not have happened without the cooperation
of the clinic and its employees, and yet police never
seemed to follow that lead. They arrested the five low
level people and then never ended up going back to
the clinic and holding any of them accountable.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Seema was among those arrested and has since been released
on bail. Anita, the woman who helped secure the girl's
fake ID, was also arrested, along with three men. The
doctors and staff at Nova IVF, the clinic that performed
the retrieval, have not been named in the case.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
What Nova said to us, they said look like We
do our best to ensure that cases like this don't happen,
but to some degree our hands are tied, like it's
not our expertise to try and weed out fake IDs.
This is where the government has to bring in biometric
verifications so that this kind of thing doesn't happen, and
we would be the first people to adopt it.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Goldman Sachs is no longer an investor in Nova IVF
and a client to comment. TPG, the private equity group
currently backing the clinic, deferred comment to Nova. Nova also
said that they've been lobbying the Indian government to mandate
more stringent ways of verifying donors' identities and ages, but
they say the government has not responded. After word got
(18:57):
out in the girl's community that she had sold her
eggs to buy a phone, the stigma she faced was severe.
Comment The girl says there are people who call her names,
who scorn and taunt her. Government questions why people are
(19:21):
only blaming her and not blaming the adults involved. Nation
blamed it. Blame this is, she says. People keep talking
(19:50):
about it, but no one asks her why she did
what she did. She says she knows she made a mistake.
Napos Gislio, are you.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
He?
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Eliza Nicols?
Speaker 4 (20:06):
She had no idea what she was getting into. All
she wanted was a phone and it ended up having
these consequences that she never could have imagined.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
So she's dropped out of school.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
You know, in stigma in close knit communities like the
ones that she lives in is something very difficult to
escape from.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Natalie says, while the girl's story may seem extreme, it's
not that unusual in India, one of the world's largest
markets for donor eggs. But the same forces that swept
up the girl, great demand and great opportunity for profit
are not limited to India. They're present wherever the human
egg trade happens, and as the market has grown, so
(20:48):
has the potential for corruption and exploitation.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
To me, fundamentally, it's about the commodification of women's body
and the commercialization of production. So big investors are in
this for the money, and we know the kind of
returns that private equity tends to expect.
Speaker 5 (21:10):
In their investments.
Speaker 4 (21:12):
I think it's a story of what happens when you
have tremendous growth and tremendous demand without guardrails. Just the
infrastructure and the regulations and the ability to enforce is
not there in India to make sure that procedures like
this happen ethically. And I think that's something that I
(21:33):
want people to think about when they come away from
the story. If you're ever in the position where you
need a donated egg, to think about where is that
coming from and how can you be sure that it
was sourced sustainably.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
That was the first episode in The Human Egg Trade,
our special series about the booming global market for human
eggs and the people whose lives are swept up in it.
The next episode in the series takes us to Greece,
where this intense demand sets the stage for a crime
with profound consequences.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
So Maria was lucky. She eventually did get pregnant and
she had a child. And last year the police asked
he 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
(22:33):
Maria saw the psychologist, her heart sunk. She knew she
was about to get bad news. They sat her down
and they broke the news to her that their investigation
had found that her eggs had been stolen.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
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,
which spans five continents and eleven countries. You can read
The Egg on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot Com or
in the January twenty twenty five issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
(23:15):
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. It was
fact checked by Adriana Tapia and mixed and sound designed
by Alex Sugia and Jessica Beck. Special thanks to Ed Vett, Pealipu,
Vicki Fung Need Two, Suda mohandas Bloomberg Originals, and Pratish Narayanan.
(23:40):
Our senior producer is Naomi shaven, Our senior editor is
Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamsterrobor Sage Bauman
is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. If you like 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.
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