Infertility

The web is littered with sites featuring cute US college students with eggs for sale.

The dark underbelly of the billion-dollar US fertility industry was exposed two years ago by Julia Derek, a Swedish student studying in the US, who made tens of thousands of dollars in nine egg "donations" to private US clinics.

In Confessions of a Serial Egg Donor, Derek described how donating eggs to fund her studies damaged her ovaries and left her an emotional wreck.

Would "some poor girl have to die" before US clinics are properly regulated, she asked.

But at least in Spain and the US there is some regulation.

In other parts of the world, a seedy trade is emerging in which poor women risk their lives, often for a pittance and for the benefit of richer women.

Romanian lawyer Dr George Magureanu complained in his own country and at the European parliament last year about the treatment of two young women - Alina, 19, and Raluca, 24 - who gave their eggs to the Globalart Clinic in Bucharest in return for "compensation" payments of £140.

The women, who worked in a mattress factory for £57 a month, claim that the clinic, which had an egg-sharing arrangement with the private Bridge Centre in London, shut its doors on them when they developed health problems after egg donation.

Dame Suzi Leather, chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Aut...

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