‘The Egg’: How We Reported Our Story on the Global Fertility Industry
More than a dozen journalists reported in person on five continents and in 11 countries to tell this story.
A microscopic view of eggs extracted from a donor at the WeFIV clinic in Buenos Aires.
Photographer: Anita Pouchard Serra/Bloomberg
This project began when Kanoko Matsuyama, a health-care reporter in Bloomberg’s Tokyo bureau, noticed that private equity firms were snapping up in vitro fertilization clinics around the world. She and Tokyo-based investigative reporter Natalie Obiko Pearson pitched a project focusing on the growing and largely unmonitored global market for human eggs. Some of their early questions were: How are IVF clinics sourcing eggs? Who’s making money from this trade? How can an IVF patient using a donor egg be sure it was ethically extracted?
For the resulting story, “The Egg,” Bloomberg Businessweek wove together four narrative threads centered on five primary characters: a teenage girl in India, lured into selling her eggs; a model in Argentina whose phenotype is prized; a mother in Greece, told by police that her eggs were stolen; and two “egg girls” from Taiwan who are part of a supply chain that runs through the US. Below we’ve outlined how we reported each thread and gathered and analyzed the story’s data. For this project, we reported in person on five continents and in 11 countries.