The sick HUMAN egg trade ‘flooding UK’ as desperate...

HUMAN eggs harvested from female slaves held captive like battery hens - it sounds like the plot for a dystopian sci-fi movie. But experts are warning that organised crime groups are now making millions of pounds from trafficking fertile women so they can cash in on our desperation to make babies in the IVF age. Our probe comes after three women escaped a human egg farm in Georgia, eastern Europe, where they were kept in horrifying conditions, fed hormones and treated like cattle by a Chinese gang.

Image Credit: The Sun [Press conference with trafficked women.]

And campaigners have given evidence to the House of Lords stating: “There is now a global trade in babies, eggs and embryos, operating around the world and involving thousands of children, and tens of thousands of eggs and embryos, every year.”. Diana Thomas, CEO and Founder of The World Egg and Sperm Bank, says the UK is being “flooded” with eggs taken from vulnerable women in Third World countries.

Image Credit: The Sun [Photo of a room where trafficked women were held captive.]

She adds that British customers are often duped into believing the eggs are ethically sourced when the reality could not be more different. She explained: “It's all a lie. They're marketing to the Western market (and shown) how to amend their profile to make them look like educated white middle-class women so that people in the Western world don't feel guilty, getting eggs from poor abused women who are not educated.”.

Image Credit: The Sun [A distressed woman sits with her head in her hands.]

Diana was one of the first women to conceive using an egg donor back in the 1980s at a time – she says - when there were “no regulations". The law has tightened up since then and there are strict rules on how IVF babies are made in the UK and other Western countries. Under British law, any fertility clinic that wants to import or export embryos fertilised by donor eggs must obtain a special licence from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).

Image Credit: The Sun [Close-up of a scientist performing in-vitro fertilization.]

Commercial surrogacy practices are banned in the UK – meaning it’s illegal to pay someone to carry an IVF baby for you - however, there is no law to stop British people from undertaking commercial surrogacy abroad. The child can then be brought back to this country where they are unlikely to see their surrogate mother or egg donor again. Previous reports have shown that women from Britain, the US and other Western countries whose ovaries can no longer produce healthy eggs are happy to pay more than £3,000 for donor eggs that could be fertilised into an embryo.

Image Credit: The Sun [A woman in a yellow jacket sits across from a person in a blue protective suit; several others are in the background.]

But there is a severe shortage of egg donors in the UK and the wait to receive an egg can be as long as two years. As a result, huge numbers of aspiring mothers are willing to go ‘freelance’ and reach out to foreign clinics through online adverts and internet chatrooms. They hope that once the egg is fertilised and implanted back into them, they will conceive the 'miracle' baby they so desperately crave.

Image Credit: The Sun [Mediterranean Fertility Institute in Crete street view.]

However, campaigners say enslaved donors are often forced to take injections to make them more fertile and are ‘hyper-stimulated’ by unregulated clinics, putting their health at risk. They are also obliged to undergo repeated and painful ‘retrieval’ procedures, in which a needle is inserted into the vagina so the eggs can be extracted from the ovaries. If the procedure is not performed correctly it can lead to complications, infections and even death in extreme cases.

Diana warns that ‘broker pimps’ are making millions from the black market as a healthy human egg – ideally extracted from a young, white European woman - is more valuable than gold. Speaking on the Inside Reproductive Health podcast, Diana said women in Ukraine, where commercial surrogacy continues despite the war with Russia, are being exploited on an industrial scale. Donors can be paid as little as £80 for each round of eggs.

Diana said: “Records are falsified. Women are forced to sign consents. They're pushed into doing far more retrievals than you would. "One woman did 24 egg retrievals to make an estimated 600 eggs, according to the reports of the whistleblower. "That donor was paid $100 per donation where the other parties including the criminals - but also including the clinics and egg banks - made a lot more money than that.

“The broker pimps that bring them in and the doctors that retrieved the eggs are making $7,500 per cohort of six. And I know that - I've got emails from people offering me those prices. “So they're making $600,000 right there. And the doctors in this country and the UK and Canada are making $20,000 off a single board of eggs.”. The latest trafficking scandal emerged last month when three rescued Thai women spoke out about the ordeal they suffered on a human egg farm in Georgia, which borders Russia.

Speaking at a press conference, their faces hidden behind immaculate surgical masks and bright blue baseball caps, the women said they were enslaved after responding to a Facebook advert offering surrogacy jobs with a potential income of 600,000 Thai baht, equivalent to £14,000. They travelled to Georgia through Dubai and Armenia. But once they arrived in the former Soviet republic, they were detained, their passports were confiscated and they were informed they would be undergoing monthly egg retrievals, or else.