The Egg: A story of extraction, exploitation, and opportunity

A single cell.
A global business worth billions.
A trade that can bring rewards—or human costs that cannot be measured.
The human egg is a precious resource, exchanged in markets open, gray or black. To tell its story, we follow a teenage girl in India, lured into selling her eggs; a model in Argentina whose genetic makeup is prized; a mother in Greece, told by police that her eggs were stolen; and two “egg girls” from Taiwan who have put themselves at risk to earn money in the US.

1.
Don't tell your mother

The Teen

She wakes early, then waits, quietly, for her mother to leave for work. The nurse in the gleaming glass building in Varanasi, India, had told her to arrive by 7 a.m., so she doesn’t have much time. Her fingers working quickly, she drapes a sari across her adolescent frame, making her look older and curvier than the salwar kameez tunics she usually prefers.

She’s tired of these trips, but this one, on Oct. 8, 2023, will be her last. For 10 days she’s been...