Black market for human eggs surges in China

Business in the underground market for human eggs is flourishing and remains a serious problem in the Chinese mainland.

"Egg collection" agencies advertise their underground services to desperate infertile couples, while young women, especially university students, are lured by the prospect of earning substantial sums of money in payment but by doing so also risking their health.

Advertisements about "egg donation" or "surrogacy" can be seen everywhere on the streets around the Center for Reproductive Medicine of the Peking University Third Hospital, as well as on universities' online discussion boards in Shanghai and Beijing.

Donors are generally expected to be educated and attractive, and a payment between 20,000 yuan (about 2,950 USD) to 60,000 yuan (about 8,860 USD) is possible depending on their level of education and appearance.

A lot of the donors are students and women from low income groups, because donating human eggs is "a quick and easy way to make money", and many have "donated three or four times", reported youth.cn.

However, the egg retrieval procedure might put donors in danger and cause complications such as chest pain and abdominal bloating, Global Times reported.

More than 40 million people in China have been diagnosed as infertile, and about 3 million women needed assisted reproductive technologies to have biological children in 2015, but few can get help through official channels, statistics show.

The Ministry of Health officially banned all commercial egg donation and extraction behaviors in 2003, and only eggs leftover from women who had undergone human-assisted reproduction in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments could be donated.

Beijing Chunlin Law Firm director Pang Jiulin said buying and selling human eggs is officially illegal on the Chinese mainland, and the agencies' behavior could constitute a crime.

However, current regulations only stipulated penalties for medical institutions who are involved in the egg donation business, but do not stipulate punishments for other individuals or agencies who were involved in the trade.