Women selling their eggs illegally is an open secret in the Indian fertility industry. Even though the for-profit industry relies on their biomaterial to keep operating, NPR found that the women whose eggs are harvested are usually poor and vulnerable to exploitation but have no recourse because they operate in a black market.
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The fertility industry and the women themselves refer to what they do as egg donation. [T]he money a woman is paid varies according to her looks, her education, her caste and the health of her eggs …. It echoes another largely unregulated market for eggs: the United States.
Critics say this illegal market exists because India radically constrained the supply of human eggs after the government passed laws in 2021 to regulate its wild-west fertility industry.
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The black market for human eggs exists in India because there’s no central registration of women who have donated their eggs. Women are “traveling from one city to the other, one state to the other,” says Dr. Duru Shah, the scientific director of an upscale Mumbai clinic.
