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