Egg Harvesting & the Dehumanization of women

“We see young women being looked at as a market for eggs. A woman has become a walking ovary factory, egg factory.” I shudder as I recall these words from Dr. Suzanne Parisian featured in our award-winning documentary, Eggsploitation. These words echoed in my mind as I read headlines this past week, “Women kept as slaves on HUMAN egg farm”.

All over the world, young women are solicited by a multi-billion dollar industry eager to make money “building families”. These women are promised significant sums of money and assured of the safety and nobility of their cause, in exchange for precious reproductive material: their eggs. This is how it started. The multi-billion dollar fertility industry commodified human eggs and now very bad actors, and even dangerous criminals, have seized the opportunity to endanger and dehumanize hundreds of women.

At the CBC, we always knew that bad actors existed in the fertility industry, but we’ve entered a whole new level of Dante’s Inferno. Three women escaped their captors and shared the horrors of being financially lured to an “egg farm” with hundreds of others. Young women were then “pumped with hormones” to stimulate their ovaries to produce eggs that would be collected each month. These eggs were then sold to be used in IVF. IVF is required in any commercial surrogacy arrangement. In the state of California, home to the CBC, men use an egg from one woman and a womb for another to have a child. No doubt, one (or more) of these eggs, from one of these enslaved women, was used in a surrogacy arrangement. A child was created and likely two women were exploited in the process- the child’s biological mother and birth mother.

The whole ordeal is absolutely appalling and sparked outrage across social media platforms like X. As it should. The idea of women living on farms, being treated like cattle, living as slaves, and being harmed and exploited is a crime against humanity. The men that kidnapped these women, enslaved and abused them, and stole their eggs should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. However, let’s go further. The entire fertility industry should be put on trial. Let’s expose the criminals within a system that normalized the buying and selling of bodies, babies, and body parts.

Young women all over the world are captivated by the promise of large sums of money for simply “donating” (selling) their eggs. They too are pumped with harmful hormones so that eggs can be extracted from their healthy bodies. You might argue that there is a difference, that these women consented. But we ask, how can women consent without knowing or understanding the risks? There is no one collecting data on young women that sell their eggs. There are no studies looking at the harms of egg harvesting in young, healthy women. We need to stop commodifying women. We need to stop buying and selling babies. Women are not human markets with their reproductive capacity for the taking.