A woman has recounted her experience of donating eggs out of financial desperation in China, and though she described it as an overall positive experience, the details of her story are deeply disturbing.
The 25-year-old woman, who went by the pseudonym “Gigi” in her interview with Radio Free Asia, said she decided to donate her eggs because she didn’t have much family support, and needed money before graduating college to relocate to Shanghai and get a job. She was told she would be given 45,000 yuan (US$6,300) in exchange for her eggs.
Gigi was then thoroughly questioned by the surrogacy agency, treating her as if she were livestock in a breeding program. She was interrogated about her height, weight, and family medical history; soon, a potential buyer was interested, and she had to undergo an interview. But when Gigi admitted her grandparents had died at the relatively young age of 60, the buyer backed out… so when another buyer was interested, Gigi was simply coached to lie by the surrogacy agency.
But the process was just getting started. As Radio Free Asia explained,
Physical examinations followed at a hospital in Shanghai, where she met the buyer for the first time, a quietly spoken woman in her 30s, who liked Gigi’s looks, particularly her height.
Gigi was sent off to stay in a hotel with two other young women, one of whom was doing it to pay for plastic surgery, the other for a vacation. All three had been offered slightly different sums for their eggs.
Each day, a black Mercedes would shuttle them back and forth between the hotel and the laboratory, where Gigi described a “huge production chain” with nurses, doctors and nutritionists that looked “formal and professional.”
There, the three women underwent repeated vaginal ultrasound scans so doctors could see when their eggs were ready for harvesting.
Gigi suffered pain afterwards, while another woman developed severe ascites, or fluid accumulating in the abdominal cavity. If left untreated, it can be life-threatening. Though Gigi said she felt she had been treated well, she told Radio Free Asia she doesn’t think the practice should continue.
READ: ‘Blatantly illegal’ ads seeking surrogates create uproar in China
“I was such a naive young woman at the time,” she said. “I didn’t think about things in a mature way, and I didn’t even have anyone to discuss this stuff with.”
The Qingdao Municipal Health Commission is currently investigating potentially illegal collusion between surrogacy and egg retrieval companies, following accusations from anti-trafficking campaigner Shangguan Zhengyi.
“An undercover investigation revealed that surrogacy companies colluded with doctors, anesthesiologists, and nurses from medical institutions such as Qingdao Women and Children’s Hospital to engage in illegal egg retrieval and embryo transplantation activities, and sold birth certificates at prices ranging from 50,000 yuan (US$7,000),” they wrote in post to their Weibo account.
In previous years, an illegal surrogacy ring was uncovered, with “services” including customizing the gender of embryos used for IVF, and if a baby was found to have disabilities at birth, representatives said they would “take care of the deformed child.”
Other hospitals have been investigated for buying and selling birth certificates, used to legitimate babies who were kidnapped or trafficked, or born through surrogacy.
