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There's no business like small business. Hiscox Small Business Insurance. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. In early 2020, after a long struggle to get pregnant, Maria and her husband started IVF.
But Maria still considered herself lucky. She lives on the island of Crete in the town called Chania, where, much to her good fortune, one of the most prominent fertility clinics had been set up a couple decades earlier. 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 Chania is a seaside tourist destination with a close-knit community, famous for its centuries-old harbor. The clinic where Maria went is about a 10-minute walk from that harbor. It was called the Mediterranean Fertility Institute.
And it drew customers from all over the world. In recent years, it had become a hub for customers from Italy or Australia or the U.S. 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. 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. She eventually did get pregnant and she had a child. Her dream had come true. Maria became a mother. And for the next three years, she raised her baby, who grew into a toddler. Then one day, in February 2024, she got a call from the police.
The police asked her to 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 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. Stolen. She didn't donate them or sell them. She initially didn't even know they'd been taken from her. 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.
This is episode two of The 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 11 countries have spent the last year trying to understand how human eggs are bought and sold around the world.
They've shed light on the $35 billion 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 in Greece where police have identified as many as 75 cases of egg theft. 75 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 reveals the unique ways that the fertility industry runs not only on capital, but on trust. We'll continue after the break.
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After a year of digging into the fertility industry, Bloomberg's Vernon Silver says the trade of human eggs behaves much like the trade of any commodity. Like any global commodity trade, where you ship things, where you invest, where you go for the best deal...
It depends on regulations and prices. And it's kind of like squeezing a water balloon where if there's pressure at one place, everybody's going to go somewhere else. 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 who's
needing a fertility treatment. What is the pitch that
Greece gives to them. 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 and IVF, its prices are lower than in the United States, for example, and other Western countries. The
The country's legal framework is another selling point. 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. So it's a combination of legal framework, money,
access and a friendly accepting economy based really from the government that wants to promote this sort of thing. And nice beaches. And nice beaches. I mean, part of what happens when you are seeking a fertility treatment, especially if it involves 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 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. Vernon says Greece's fertility industry has another geographic advantage.
proximity to Eastern Europe. It 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. 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. 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 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. The clinic where Maria went, the Mediterranean Fertility Institute, had been on the radar of Greek regulators for years. In 2019, 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 the suspension went unenforced and the clinic remained open.
It would take another four years before Greek authorities were once again at its door. A few months before the police invited Maria 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 shut down. The police told Vernon they were once again looking into the clinic's surrogacy practices.
But once they got inside, they found evidence of other kinds of crime. 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, 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 of, for example, 12 eggs removed from patient A and then six given as a donation to patient B and six made use of by patient A, the original one, that it all added up.
to them literally siphoning off half of the eggs for somebody else. — The police also found that the clinic had a consent form 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.
What they wanted to know from Maria was had she consented to this, quote, donation. And had she? She 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,
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 show that half of your eggs went to somebody else. 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? You would never know.
Possibly. You could know later on, you know, if somebody did a 23andMe test or if you walked down the street and saw someone who looked a lot like your own kid. I mean, there are ways, conceivably, to find out. A DNA test. A gut feeling. But in the moment, it's impossible to know. That's because a woman undergoing an egg retrieval is typically given anesthesia —
It's only after she comes to that she's told exactly how many eggs were collected. But the really haunting story
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 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?
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Earlier this year, Bloomberg's Vernon Silver went to visit a secure room at Chania 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. We have sensors.
Is it top secret? Can I take a picture? Yes, yes. A doctor punched a passcode into a keypad and unlocked the door to the climate-controlled room. It's nice and cold. Nice and cold. Of course. Inside, they showed Vernon the six rounded metal containers that were lined up against a wall. It looks like R2-D2 from Star Wars. The canisters look 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. And these things here, they... These are the sensors. So this is an expensive operation because you also have...
This thing that goes down, what is that? That's the ice. 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 900 people. But Vernon says the canisters represent only part of the chaos that ensued from the clinic's closure.
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 tests.
In the early morning hours of August 8, 2023, 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 Khania General Hospital took over their care and the care of the 17 babies they gave birth to. It would take eight months and 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 safekeeping after Russia invaded.
And some of it had come from the clinic's foreign clients. The embryologist charged with caring for them told Vernon the canisters contained frozen eggs and embryos from about 125 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's services.
And some were clients of Sam Everingham. Through parents who were contacting me saying, look, we're here for the birth of our child, but no one's here. The staff have all gone. They're in jail. We're stuck. 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. 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. Oh, it was horrifying. Yeah.
Yeah, it was really tough. We had to get them in touch with 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 around embryo export. So it ended up being a really difficult process.
for people around the risks of cross-border reproductive care. You can't be on the ground looking at what these clinics are doing and they'd pull the wool over the eyes of so many people. Seeing the fallout from the closure of the Mediterranean Fertility Institute made Sam re-examine his own experience with the fertility industry. I suddenly started questioning the kind of things that were happening in India when we'd done it all those years before and
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.
And yeah, so look, we got the DNA test done and sure enough, we'd been told they were the same egg donor, but the results showed 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 clinic tells you they've used one egg donor and you find out, well, no, they hadn't. Once Sam and his family had the results, they discovered they weren't alone. We suddenly started realizing, we're talking to other parents who'd done the same kind of tests and found the same sort of things.
The kids they'd had in the same country were also different 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? It just felt like a betrayal, a betrayal from the IVF clinic's point of view in terms of, you know, not being honest, not being open with us at the time about how they were creating embryos.
While reporting the story, Vernon came across cases of egg theft in many countries, including ones in India and Israel, Italy and the U.S. 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 mere slaps on the wrists of the doctors involved. Vernon's story is a little bit different.
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 2023, Greek police arrested eight Mediterranean Fertility Institute staff members, 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 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.
Maria, after her first reaction of thinking, my gosh, 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 didn't know.
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. Each woman who did IVF at this clinic was given a code, a customer code. And 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. 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 donor one, two, three, four seeking egg recipient, you know, five, six, 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 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 schoolmate of her child.
While police have identified as many as 75 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 women who received them. 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. What about all the women and families who went to that clinic and aren't informed who think, gosh, maybe I got stolen eggs? Maria says, you know, these if she has a child, you know, it's it's my child, but it's not my child. It's this other woman's or this other family's child. But what's to stop someone like Maria from trying to claim custody?
Vernon says cases like these lay bare 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 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. The next episode in the series follows one couple's globe-spanning journey to start a family and what it cost them. They call their son 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. And did they go into debt? They did go into debt, yes.
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.com, or in the January 2025 issue of 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. It was fact-checked by Adriana Tapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Ugiura and Jessica Beck.
Our senior producer is Naomi Chavon. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster-Boer. 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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