A shocking report claims women have been trafficked from Thailand to a human egg farm in the former Soviet republic of Georgia to forcibly harvest their eggs. Some of the Thai women who were able to escape are now telling their stories.
According to the Bangkok Post, Pavena Hongsakula, founder of the Pavena Foundation for Children and Women, led the efforts to rescue the women after one of them was able to escape. That woman said she paid the Chinese gang of captors 70,000 baht (just over $2,000 USD) for her freedom.
The woman also told Pavena that there were still more Thai women enslaved there, and Pavena worked with Foreign Affairs police and Interpol to rescue three more women.
Georgia’s interior ministry claimed that the women at the egg farm were there of their own free will. In a statement, it said, “Up to 70 foreign citizens were interviewed, however none of them, except for 3 Thai women, had any complaints … the 3 Thai women explained that they no longer wanted to be surrogate mothers and stay at their residential address.”
The survivors, however, have denied that they were participating willingly and said that they had been trafficked. They claim they were lured to Georgia with promises of 400,000 to 600,000 baht (around $12,000 – 18,000 USD) to be surrogates for childless couples. When they arrived, however, they were imprisoned, alongside over 100 women. They say they were given no payment whatsoever. Instead, they were forced to have their eggs harvested each month.
“They took us to a house where there were 60 to 70 Thai women,” one woman said. “There were no surrogacy contracts or parents. Women were injected with hormones, anesthetized, and their eggs extracted by machine every month.”
The women alleged that if they were caught trying to escape, they had to pay a ransom, and said the gang took their passports away from them as well, making it impossible for them to return to Thailand.
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It’s not clear how Georgia will respond to these serious allegations, but the government seems disinclined to take the issue seriously; surrogacy is a booming business there, even as some try to put a stop to it.
This is also not the only instance of women being trafficked and forced into surrogacy or egg harvesting.
In 2023, police raided a fertility clinic in Greece, where 169 vulnerable women from countries including Moldova, Ukraine, Romania, Georgia, and Albania were forced to be egg donors and surrogates and held in “safe houses” under “controlled conditions” until the surrogacy process was complete. A “baby factory” was also discovered in Nigeria in 2019, with women there having been kidnapped, trafficked, and raped; once impregnated, their babies were stolen from them and sold. In China, women are being lured from Russia and Belarus to donate their eggs, only to undergo excruciatingly painful medical procedures without anesthesia in underground, makeshift clinics.
Diana Thomas, CEO of The World Egg and Sperm Bank, said wealthy couples in Western countries often believe they are receiving donor eggs and sperm from wealthy, well-educated, privileged Westerners like them. The reality is far more disturbing. “It’s all a lie,” she told the Express Tribune. “They manipulate donor profiles so customers don’t feel guilty about using eggs from poor, abused women.”
