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This is In Conversation from Apple News.

I'm Shemitabasu.

Today, the dark side of the global human egg trade.

Like millions of people around the world, Maria knew that she wanted to have kids.

She was in her late 30s, and she and her husband weren't able to conceive on their own.

So they decided to try in vitro fertilization, IVF, in their home country of Greece.

Their first two attempts failed. Then in 2020, on their third try, the clinic told her they successfully retrieved six eggs from her ovaries. A few weeks later, Maria was pregnant.

Four years went by when Maria, who was using a pseudonym for this story, was

summoned to the local police station. Waiting there for her were two police officers and a

psychologist. And what they told her, she found completely devastating. The fertility clinic she'd

worked with actually retrieved double the number of eggs they told her, and those

eggs had been used to create embryos for another woman. The egg is the most precious resource

in fertility, and it is limited. That's Susan Burfield, a senior investigative reporter at Bloomberg

Businessweek. Despite all the technology, you still need an egg and a sperm to create a baby, and sperm is pretty easy to come by.

In a deeply investigated piece, Susan and a team of reporters tell the stories of Maria and four other women who willingly or unwillingly are part of the global human egg market.

Here's Natalie Obico Pearson, another reporter on this story.

The person who is seeking the procedure is willing to pay almost anything. They're willing to

drain their bank accounts to pay for it. And that unfortunately means that the power balance

usually is with a higher paying customer who is able to compensate a woman that is less privileged who needs that money and so is therefore selling her eggs.

...