Dia Hadid
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
He says these premium donors are paid between $3,000 to $7,000 for their highly sought-after eggs.
And to extract those premium eggs, he says he has two options.
He can arrange a procedure for the woman in India.
He paints it as a glamorous side hustle for the women involved and talks about a premium donor he's sent to Kenya.
But for the majority of women who supply their biomaterial to the fertility industry, the reality is far from glamorous.
Abhirami is 34 and lives in a slum in the southern city of Chennai.
Like other women we interview in this slum, she asks to only use her first name because she doesn't want to risk getting in trouble.
The women belong to a group at the bottom of South Asia's caste hierarchy.
They're known as Parayar, from where the English gets the word pariah.
Abirami and her girlfriends walk us through their homes, each a tiny room in a row of tiny rooms down a tight alleyway.
They're painted bright blues and purples.
The mats are rolled in one corner, a gas burner for cooking in the other.
Abhirami's husband polishes spoons in a steel mill for about a dollar a day.
She says he drinks away his wages.
They have two daughters, but they live with Abhirami's sister-in-law.
She works in a toy workshop assembling plastic guns for about $3 a day.