A story of extraction, exploitation and opportunity

Text by Vernon Silver

Photographs by Ioanna Sakellaraki

(This is an extract from the original globe- spanning investigation on the topic centered on one of the five primary characters: Maria from the city of Chania on the Greek island of Crete. Whereas Maria asked that I do not photograph her, she directed me to places that are meaningful to her in the process of sharing her story as a mother being told by Greek police that her eggs were stolen by the Mediterranean Fertility Institute (MFI) in Chania during her In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF). As part of the investigative piece, more than a dozen journalists reported in person on five continents and 11 countries. Full story can be found here and on the Bloomberg Businessweek print issue.)

The Mother
Tracking codes

For Maria, it is already a bad sign that two police officers have summoned her to their station. When the duo say the woman with them is a psychologist, she braces for the worst.

As the four take seats, all Maria knows is that the matter relates to the birth of her 3-year-old child—the happy result of in vitro fertilization.

(Maria is a pseudonym. She shared her story but asked we withhold her name.)

Four years earlier, Maria had gone to a fertility clinic near her home on the Greek island of Crete to have eggs retrieved. She wasn’t donating her eggs. As a smoker in her late 30s, she would have been a poor candidate, even if that was her intention.

She just wanted to have a child. But now, these police officers—members of a national organized-crime unit—are saying she had been lied to.

The clinic staff had told her they’d harvested a half dozen eggs. But the real number was twice that, the police tell her. The other eggs had been used to create embryos for another woman.

This news devastates Maria. To her, it means one thing: She might be the mother of another child.

The psychologist is there to help process the news. For Maria, questions swirl. She wants to know: How many other children does she have? One? Three? None? And she wants to know: How was this allowed to happen?

The police are also summoning other women, delivering similar news. Most, like Maria, live in and around Chania, a seaside tourist town that had become an unlikely hub of the global fertility industry. The Mediterranean Fertility Institute, or MFI, was a magnet for aspiring parents from nations with restrictive assisted-reproduction laws. But to make babies, the clinic needed ova.

The police, in these visits, need to nail down a key detail from women whose names had shown up in records seized at the clinic: Did they ever give permission to surrender some of their eggs?

The officers ask Maria what happened at the clinic in early 2020. Maria reconstructs the day her eggs were retrieved, then asks questions of her own.

Yes, the police tell her, clinic records showed that it actually had been her eggs and her husband’s sperm that produced her child. That part had gone normally. Unfortunately, the police tell her, records indicate her remaining eggs became a “donation” to another woman—and no, they don’t know if the other woman had any babies using Maria’s eggs.

Who is this other woman? Maria is led to believe the police know but can’t say, due in part to Greek privacy law surrounding egg and sperm donation. But while the police don’t give a name, they do give something else. The clinic had assigned tracking codes to the women passing through. Egg donors received six-digit codes, IVF patients four-digit codes.

Maria already had her own code. Before she leaves the station, police give her another, the code for the woman who got her eggs.

The Mother
An assembly of women

It was early 2020, the first days of Covid, when Maria made the quick drive across Chania to have her eggs retrieved.

This was her third IVF attempt. The first two had failed. But Maria and her husband felt lucky that right in their town they had a clinic, operating since 1992, that attracted prospective parents from all over.

The Mediterranean Fertility Institute’s founder, a Greek gynecologist, had fashioned himself into a fertility personality—presenting at conferences and cultivating a following of families who posted baby pictures on Facebook. In more recent years he’d been joined by a Greek embryologist who, as scientific director, helped expand the operation.

“They were taking on a lot of cases. A ton,” says Sam Everingham, global director of a surrogacy and egg donation agency in Australia.

When Maria arrived that day for her retrieval, there were no partners in the waiting room, as Covid restrictions barred guests. A drawing of a woman cradling a baby hung on a wall. At the staff’s instruction, she’d already undergone weeks of tests and appointments, some of which puzzled her, including a genetic screening for cystic fibrosis. She was going to use her eggs to attempt a pregnancy, no matter what the lab results were, so why bother? Nevertheless, she was ready for what was now a familiar retrieval procedure.

First came the consent form, which she said she recalls vividly. It included a box to tick if she wanted to share any excess embryos, which she did not mark. The form had nothing about eggs, she said. (A woman employed by the clinic at the time as a junior embryologist corroborated Maria’s description of MFI’s release forms.)

Maria, after going under, awoke to be told the retrieval was a success. Her eggs would be fertilized and the embryos frozen, to be implanted in a few weeks.

On a spring day, Maria returned to the clinic and joined an assembly line of women. If she ever unknowingly crossed paths with the woman who got her eggs, there’s a chance this was the moment.

The IVF patients cycled through in groups of about half a dozen each. They were implanted, one after another, in a private surgery room, then sent to rest for 15 to 20 minutes in an adjacent room lined with beds. It was so crowded that when Maria emerged from her procedure there was no bed to spare. So she sat in a chair next to a row of other women, hoping the embryo would take hold.

As soon as her group was done, another came in right behind.

The Mother
Wiretaps

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted an important crossroads of the egg trade. In February 2022, staff at Ukrainian cryobanks stuffed canisters of frozen genetic material into cars and sped them across the Polish and Slovakian borders. One destination was the MFI clinic in Chania, Greece, which announced it would provide safekeeping.

This same year, the Greek national police’s organized crime unit noted all the activity at a house where the clinic housed pregnant surrogates. The police launched an investigation in December 2022, with court permission to tap phones of clinic staff.

Police mapped what they said was a criminal network with the clinic at its center. In August 2023, they arrested eight MFI staff members, including the clinic’s founding doctor and its scientific director. Both remain in jail awaiting possible trial.

Police took control of the clinic, and genetic material in frozen storage at MFI was transferred to Chania General Hospital.

The police, now with access to the clinic’s files, continued investigating. As they sifted through handwritten records, they spotted a pattern involving IVF patients like Maria. Eggs would be retrieved from the patient. Some, but not all, would be used to make embryos for her. On that same day, a different woman would receive a “donation” of fresh eggs—equivalent to the number not used for the IVF patient.

The details of this ongoing probe have not yet been made public. But police had identified up to 75 cases of egg theft at MFI. The final count could be much higher, a Greek judicial source said.

The Mother
‘I just want to know’

On a recent sunny weekday in Chania, Maria greets a reporter at the store where she works in the town’s bustling center. An icon of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus hung on the wall. Asked how she’s doing, Maria turns to her computer screen, opens a web page with Google Translate, and types a word in Greek on the left-hand side. On the right, the result emerges: “Psychologist.”

She’s getting professional help, but her therapist says there simply isn’t an entry in the psychology manuals for the trauma of having your oocytes stolen.
Maria compares it to kidnapping, like old stories of women being told their baby hasn’t survived birth, when actually they were given away for adoption. “They don’t even have to do that anymore,” she says. “They just take your eggs.”

Scenarios rattle around in her imagination. One is: Her child grows up and falls in love with someone roughly the same age. Maria will wonder: Could they be siblings? Will Maria be on constant lookout for a family resemblance?

And if Maria does have another child out there, what about that child’s family?
“The child’s mine, but it’s not mine,” Maria says. “It’s their child.”

Maria’s been thinking about those tracking codes—the one for her, and the one for the woman who received her eggs. She’s been pondering what to do with them. She hopes police will provide a way for families to connect with each other—if they want. But if there’s no official route, the women in possession of those codes could act on their own, perhaps using social media. It could be as simple as a Facebook group where mothers post, “Code 1234 seeking Code 6789.”

“I don’t want to take their child away from them,” Maria says of the family that she imagines as far away as North America or Australia, or as near as her neighborhood in Crete.

“I just want to know.”

Image titles in order of appearance:

Pomegranate, the Greek fruit of fertility, its seeds and a black glove at a local backyard, Chania, 2024

Grape pulps and seeds on a prickly pear cactus (opuntia), Chania, 2024

Virgin Mary and Jesus, Assumption Cathedral of Chania, 2024

Replica mask by a male sculptor for a female statue whose face has collapsed, Chania, 2024

Mediterranean Fertility Institute (MFI), currently shut down, Chania, 2024

Window reflection of female mannequins lined at local shop at the center of Chania, 2024

Local kindergarten, Chania, 2024

Tree hollow with a shadow of a hand, Chania, 2024

Pigeons flocking together on the dome of the mosque of the Janissaries, the oldest Ottoman building on Crete, Chania, 2024