Dia Hadid

The doctor said when a couple comes to her and the woman can't produce her own eggs, she tells them that her hospital will help them, but it's going to cost a little extra.

And one way she procures those eggs is through an agent.

An agent is the person who will often end up finding women.

They move them through the process of extracting their eggs and they pay them.

This go-between person allows the fertility clinic to plausibly say, we aren't paying women for their eggs.

We're paying an agent to recruit women for us.

It was even harder to get an agent to speak to us.

But we found one woman.

Her name is Ruby.

We connected over a crackly Zoom call.

She asks we only use her first name.

Of course, her work isn't legal.

Ruby says she had a dead-end job at a New Delhi call centre and wanted to make more money.

Her friend talked her into selling her eggs and then Ruby realised she could make more as an agent.

We hear it's common for women who age out of selling their eggs to turn to this hustle.

Each month, Ruby gets about a dozen requests for egg donors, mostly over WhatsApp.

Ruby says clinics mostly want women who are educated, light-skinned and pretty.

She finds them through her networks and social media.

Ruby will find a donor, agree on a price, get their details.

Sometimes she directs women to their scans, arranges their daily hormone jabs, lines up their egg retrieval.