The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers by Scott Carney

Author:Scott Carney [Carney, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: Science, History, Non-Fiction, Sociology, Health
ISBN: 9780061936463
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

WHILE THE CLINICS OF Cyprus sometime feel like frontier outposts, the ones in Spain seem like established fortresses. Spain has been the top destination for European fertility tourists since the mid-1980s. At Barcelona’s Institut Marquès, a fourteenth-century carriage house in one of the poshest areas of town, you can understand why they’ve made a fortune in the egg business.

Inside, behind sliding-glass doors and whooshing air locks, are two embryology labs where a half dozen workers in blue scrubs and ventilated face masks help turn baby-making from a romantic endeavor into a scientific one. One woman looking at her computer monitor zooms in on an area full of squiggling sperm and a giant human egg. She turns a dial on a control panel and slowly manipulates a microscopic hypodermic needle toward a lone squirming sperm. As it’s lined up she presses another button and sucks it up into a chamber off the computer screen. Once there a tiny knife lops off its tail.

“If we cut off the tail it helps the genetic material escape once we implant it into the egg,” she says. Then, as if to punctuate the sentence, she thrusts the needle’s point through the egg’s cell wall and squirts the tiny genetic bundle inside. Presto. Life via laboratory.

This embryo, along with its siblings, has two paths. Two or three of the strongest and most obviously viable will be implanted into a woman who hired the clinic’s services, while the five or six excess embryos will sit cooling in a liquid nitrogen bath just in case the first batch doesn’t take. Only then will they get a chance to form into something more significant than a bunch of cells.

If one does take and becomes a child then it will probably grow up in Britain. In 2009 the Institut Marquès opened a satellite office in London, offering full-service, pregnancy-guaranteed packages for as little as $37,000 for three IVF cycles. Since each cycle has an approximate 30 percent chance of becoming a viable pregnancy, the overall odds are good.

The stream of foreign customers is so steady that the clinic no longer waits for patients to sign on before tracking down appropriate donors. Instead it keeps a bullpen of women on hormones, ready to give eggs. The clinic simply matches up incoming customers with eggs that are already coming in along the supply chain.

“Sometimes we will lose the eggs if we can’t find a customer, but it’s a trade-off. This way we can guarantee a steady supply,” says Joseph Oliveras, an embryologist at the clinic. The system allows for very short waiting times. It also helps that according to Spanish law, the patient has no control over selecting their donor’s characteristics. Matching donors is entirely left to the doctor’s discretion, usually by phenotype, but the choice is also probably influenced by availability.

Clinics recruit heavily at Spanish universities and occasionally pepper campuses with flyers. A college diploma is a selling point to customers especially when they can’t know much more than this about the donor.

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