‘No other way to earn money’: Why women from poor families become egg donors for infertile couples
By Priyanka Vora,
Scroll.in
| 06. 19. 2018
In March, Mumbai resident Shaheeda Khan*, 26, spent 20 days at a fertility clinic in Kerala, where doctors gave her hormone injections every day. The shots were aimed at stimulating her ovaries to make them produce multiple eggs, not just the one or two they would generate naturally in a month. At the end of the 20 days, several of Khan’s eggs were surgically extracted and fertilised in a laboratory – a procedure known as in-vitro fertilisation or IVF. Khan did not know where the sperms for the fertilisation process came from, nor what happened to the embryos. Some of these would be implanted in the wombs of women willing to bear children.
Though the clinic listed Khan as an “egg donor”, this was a euphemism. Khan was paid Rs 45,000 for undergoing the procedure.
Women like Khan are small parts of a global IVF machine that was valued at $15 billion in 2017, according to one estimate. Said a doctor who treats infertility in Chennai, requesting anonymity, “Eggs are the raw materials for IVF procedures and these donors...
Related Articles
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 03.10.2024
In 1889, a French doctor named Francois-Gilbert Viault climbed down from a mountain in the Andes, drew blood from his arm and inspected it under a microscope. Dr. Viault’s red blood cells, which ferry oxygen, had surged 42 percent. He...
By Ian Sample, The Guardian | 03.08.2024
Scientists are a step closer to making IVF eggs from patients’ skin cells after adapting the procedure that created Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, more than two decades ago.
The work raises the prospect of older women being...
By Mariella Bodemeier Loayza Careaga, The Scientist | 03.15.2024
Scientists have genetically modified isolated microbes for decades. Now, using CRISPR, they intend to target entire microbiomes.
Humans are never alone. Even in a room devoid of other people, they are always in the company of billions of microscopic beings...
Sheep have been domesticated for roughly 12,000 years. Sheep have also been cloned since 1996; Dolly (pictured) was the first mammal to suffer that indignity. But this news was featured in the March 14 issue of Business Insider:
Montana rancher paid $4,200 to clone a dead sheep and launched a farm of super hybrids worth up to $550,000
Some people — not just Montanans but Texans too and probably others — pay to indulge in “captive hunting,” and large...