Dia Hadid

She says she was told to come back after she got her period.

And when she returned, she was injected.

She's not sure with what, but it was most likely hormones to stimulate her ovaries to produce more eggs.

Every day for about 10 days, Abirami went back to the clinic.

She counted seven bus stops to know where she had to get off and the nurse ushered her into a room to be injected.

She says she thought she'd die from the nausea she was experiencing.

She began swelling around her stomach.

Based on what we've heard from doctors, her response to the injections sounds like she'd been overstimulated, which isn't uncommon.

She focused on the money she'd make.

But when her husband noticed her swelling, she says he beat her up.

Abhirami remembers shouting at him, you drink away your money, I don't have enough for rice.

For that, a doctor put her under anaesthesia.

She isn't sure how the eggs came out, but typically they're removed with a long, thin needle that goes through the wall of a woman's vagina, and they're extracted from follicles on a woman's ovaries.

The nice thing, Abhirami says, was that she got to sleep overnight in the hospital for the procedure.

For years, India's for-profit fertility industry was under-regulated and highly commercial.

But after a series of scandals, lawmakers reacted with a dramatic restructuring.

In 2021, the Assisted Reproductive Technology Act, or ART law as it's called, restricted access to fertility treatments to married heterosexual couples and demanded that women provide their biological material for free.

So this is what the underground market looks like now.

Marginalized women, often desperate for money, sell their eggs for a fraction of the cost that it would be in the U.S.

And despite the great toll it takes on them and the cash being exchanged, fertility clinics and egg banks call this a donation.