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Svetlana has a big family secret: she sold her eggs for US dollars. Svetlana did not tell her husband what she was doing because she knew he would be furious. Nor did she tell her mother or her two young children. Every day after lunch this 27-year-old unemployed cook would sneak out of her cramped, Soviet-era tower block on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, to go for hormone injections that would stimulate her ovaries into producing dozens of eggs. Each one of these had the potential of becoming a relative that her family would never know about.

Desperate for money after the birth of her second child, Svetlana had applied for work in the canteen of one of Kiev's growing number of fertility clinics that charge infertile women from Britain thousands of pounds for help in getting them pregnant.

Svetlana didn't get the job, but was told that if she needed cash she could sell her eggs. She was told that the process was straightforward and that she would be given US$300 -- more if she was a...