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MUMBRA, India — The afternoon sun shines on the woman in a commuter-town café, highlighting her almond-shaped eyes and pale skin, a look often sought after by couples who need an egg to have a baby.
"I have good eggs," she laughs — good enough that she guesses she's a biological mother to at least 30 children.
The 34-year-old woman requests we withhold her full name, because to survive, she sells her eggs, which is illegal in India. NPR refers to her by "H," the initial of her first name.
Producing multiple eggs isn't easy on the human body. Typically a woman in her reproductive years will release one egg a month — it's either fertilized or flushed out with her period.
But when H has a commission, she'll inject herself with hormones for days to stimulate her ovaries to produce 20 to 30 eggs at a time. While she's under anesthesia, a health worker inserts a long thin needle through the wall of H's vagina to retrieve those eggs from her ovaries.
H says doctors who have extracted her...