Dia Hadid

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.

Academics who've researched this industry say, as it exists, it's a disaster for vulnerable women.

That's Vrinda Marva.

She is an assistant professor at the University of South Florida, and she studied the fertility industry.

We spoke to three members of the regulatory board that oversees implementation of India's assisted reproductive technology laws.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because they're not authorised to speak to the media.

They said the laws were designed to offer legal clarity for the industry, safety for couples trying to have a baby, and guaranteed medical insurance and care for the women whose eggs were being harvested or who were acting as surrogates.

The law was meant to halt the exploitation of those women.

The board members we spoke to said they were not aware of the vast underground market that has emerged since these new laws were passed.

A senior member of the board was also not aware that in one case, in the northern city of Varanasi, a 13-year-old girl was lured into selling her eggs to one of India's largest fertility clinic franchises.