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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Hi, Mwan Ha 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 15 seconds.
And as the demand for these eggs 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, 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. 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 sari. When she grows up, she'd like to become a beautician.
And in 2023, she wanted what so many teens around the world want, a smartphone. The girl 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. Chaachi means aunt in Hindi.
It's what the girl called her grandmother's neighbor. The woman's name is Seema. We're not using her last name because it could help identify the girl. And Seema knew a way the girl could get the money for a phone. But if she went through with it, she wasn't allowed to tell her mom.
The girl said that Seema didn't really explain what it was. She has said herself, 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. That's Natalie Obiko Pearson. She's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg who was based in India for many years. Seema just told her this is how you can make 15,000 rupees really quick. And so she was like, OK, I'll go along with it.
15,000 rupees is about 180 U.S. dollars. 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. She'd agreed to sell her ex-husband.
In doing so, she was pulled into a global industry that's boomed in the last 20 years, especially within India. 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 were 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 used is like they were like mushrooms. Once they began to grow, they just began cropping up everywhere. ♪
Today on the show, the human egg trade, a special series from Bloomberg's investigations team and the Big Take podcast. While IVF or in vitro fertilization has been around since the 1970s, early success rates were low. But over the last two decades, advancements in technology and funding from 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 15 seconds. Most are from women who plan to use those eggs themselves. But at least 6% come from women who donate their eggs. 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 prized commodity is harvested not from fields, fisheries or mines, but from the bodies of women and even girls. 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.
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. Our story starts after the break.
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Bloomberg's Natalie Obico-Pearson says there are a few reasons why India is seen as the de facto capital of the fertility industry. One is because the sheer size of the population makes the global IVF market there extremely large. The other reason is cultural. 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 son?
And that drives the egg donation market because couples there are often willing to maybe just try like one cycle of IVF. And then if they don't get pregnant, will immediately opt for a donor egg. And it was such a striking phenomenon that a couple IVF donors,
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 donations straight away. 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. 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 extracted. So what person is going to do that completely altruistically, right? Like the people who are doing it are usually doing it because they need money.
And so that means that most of the donors are coming from poorer neighborhoods. And more vulnerable backgrounds. In 2021, after 16 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 pay donors by compensating for related costs like their time and travel. And it also made it illegal for anyone under 23 years old to donate. 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 to source donors. 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. 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
cleaner at a hospital. It might be a woman in the neighborhood who is also sourcing blood donations and kidney donations and the like. And so word travels along the grapevine in a lot of less privileged neighborhoods that this is one way to make some fast cash if you need it. The girl's family comes from one of the lowest tiers in India's caste 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 started with shots. So it was 10 days of visiting the clinic and going for hormone 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 Seema was having to sort of cajole her and make sure she attended her appointments.
And, you know, I've undergone IVF myself. 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. It can be painful at times. To the extent that you know, did she have any doubts during that process? I think there were moments where she was like, oh, I'm done with this. This is like too much.
But the girl told Natalie that by that point, Seema said it was too late. Seema 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." The girl was about 13 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, Seema helped the girl disguise her age.
They started with her outfit. 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 salwar kameezes 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. The girl met Seema 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. 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 Mangalsutra 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. Did the people in the clinic...
believe that she was who she said she was and she was as old as she said she 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 Seema to leave the room because they wanted to hear from the girl herself. And then they were like, OK, why are you doing this? How many children have you had?
The girl says she answered those questions the way Seema 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.
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. It's usually quite quick. It's over in about 10 minutes.
The girl says she woke up from the procedure feeling woozy. She was in pain, her stomach hurt, and she was alone. When she comes to, she's like, nobody's there, the doctor's gone, nobody's talking to me.
She sees a nurse. She's like, can I go? And the nurse is like, yeah, sure. So she gets up and leaves and she walks out of the clinic. Anita goes to an ATM nearby, pulls out 15,000 rupees, hands it to Seema. Seema takes her cut, gives 11,600 rupees to the girl and goes immediately to buy her phone. 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.
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Business leaders Microsoft surveyed saw an average of 3.7 times ROI per $1 invested in generative AI. Growing and innovating your business is your job. Microsoft helps you achieve that with innovative AI tools and experiences to guide you confidently into the future. Whatever change comes next, let Microsoft help you keep pushing forward. For more details, visit Microsoft.com slash challengers.
Bloomberg's Natalie Obico-Pearson went to see the clinic where the girls' eggs were retrieved. It's part of a chain, which is one of the biggest in India. It's called Nova IVF Fertility. Walking up to the Nova IVF clinic. 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 hospital. Big glass building with sort of blue reflective windows, modern. There's like an eyeglasses shop on the bottom, which is selling designer sunglasses for more than the girl got paid for her eggs. The building is also covered with billboards. Our colleague, Advett Palipu, helped Natalie translate them from Hindi. Your quest to become a mother and father. Start your journey to be a mother and father.
Nova IVF has had some big-name investors. Its growth was funded by Western financiers. Goldman Sachs was one of its very early investors. It was set up by a U.S.-based private equity firm. Today, it's owned by TPG, another private equity firm. The rush to cash in on India's fertility industry has ramped up in recent years. I'd say in the last...
maybe like five to eight years or so, five to 10 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. 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. Seema and another agent end up getting into a quarrel on the street over the girl. The other agent is accusing Seema 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. ♪
The girl's mother says that she was angry when she found out what her daughter had done. But since everyone was already starting to gossip, she didn't want to pile on. She says what had been lost was lost.
So as a mother, her job was to make sure something was done about it. So the mom confronts Seema. She ends up filing a police complaint. 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.
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 with sex and maybe sexual assault and the kind of implications that can have for a woman in Indian society. A violation. A violation. And it sparked the kind of questions that really are ongoing.
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, they're gossiping. Is she ever going to be able to have kids? The complaint sparked an investigation. The medical officer's report was pretty explicit. 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. 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. 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 verification so that this kind of thing doesn't happen and we would be the first people to adopt it. Goldman Sachs is no longer an investor in Nova IVF and declined 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 out in the girl's community that she had sold her eggs to buy a phone, the stigma she faced was severe. The girl says there are people who call her names, who scorn and taunt her. But she questions why people are only blaming her.
and not blaming the adults involved.
She says people keep talking about it, but no one asks her why she did what she did. She says she knows she made a mistake.
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. So she's dropped out of school. You know, and stigma in close-knit communities like the ones that she lives in is something very difficult to escape from. 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 has the potential for corruption and exploitation. To me, fundamentally, it's about the commodification of women's body and the commercialization of reproduction.
So big investors are in this for the money. And we know the kind of returns that private equity tends to expect in their investments. 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 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?
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. So...
Maria was lucky. She eventually did get pregnant and she had a child. And last year, 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 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. 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 11 countries. 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 Sugura and Jessica Beck.
Special thanks to Edvet Palipu, Vicky Fung, Mithu Sudha Mohandas, Bloomberg Originals, and Pratish Narayanan. Our senior producer is Naomi Chauvin. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster-Boer. 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.
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