When a young woman agrees to undergo painful hormone injections and surgery to pay for her father’s life-saving kidney transplant, it exposes a deep moral crisis in Indian healthcare. The November 2026 police raids in Hyderabad, which rescued more than forty women from West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha, did more than just break up a local criminal gang. They uncovered a hidden business that thrives on extreme poverty, rising infertility, and weak oversight. Behind the clean, modern walls of some urban fertility clinics lies an illegal supply chain where human eggs are treated like goods to be bought and sold, harvested from the bodies of India’s poorest women.
To see how these rackets work, one only needs to look at what police discovered in Telangana and Maharashtra. In the Hyderabad raids led by Malkajgiri, Begumpet, and Saroornagar police, middlemen targeted women facing urgent medical or financial emergencies. They offered these women between ₹30,000 and ₹50,000 per cycle, a small fraction of the lakhs of rupees that couples pay fertility clinics. Other victims were lured with false promises of catering or hotel jobs, only to have their Aadhaar cards and bank passbooks taken away as soon as they arrived. Kept inside cramped apartments, these women were given strong hormone injections by untrained agents before being quietly taken to partner clinics to have their eggs surgically removed.
The Hyderabad case is far from an isolated incident. Just months earlier, in May 2026, Maharashtra police filed a major chargesheet in the Badlapur IVF racket, naming fifteen accused, including five doctors and the head of an IVF centre, across Mumbai, Thane, Pune, and Baramati. Investigators found that more than 250 illegal egg removals had been performed on over thirty financially struggling women. In one shocking case, a single woman had her eggs harvested thirty-seven times before becoming a recruiter herself, a tragic path also taken by three other arrested women who went from being victims to recruiting others. Similarly, the mid-2025 bust of an unlicensed sperm bank and surrogacy network in Hyderabad showed how fake IDs and illegal egg and sperm collection often feed into larger, interstate baby-selling and illegal surrogacy rings.
On paper, India has very strict laws designed to stop this kind of exploitation. Passed in December 2021 and put into effect in January 2022, the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2021, along with the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, strictly bans the buying, selling, or trading of human eggs, sperm, and embryos. Under Section 27 of the ART Act, an egg donor must be a married woman between 23 and 35 years old who already has at least one living child of her own. Most importantly, the law states that a woman can donate eggs only once in her lifetime, limits doctors to collecting no more than seven eggs during that single cycle, and requires the clinic or couple to buy twelve months of health insurance for the donor under Section 22. Breaking these laws carries heavy punishment, including fines of ₹5 lakh to ₹10 lakh for a first offence, and eight to twelve years in prison for repeat offenders.
However, a closer look at the fertility industry reveals a painful contradiction: the very rules meant to protect women have accidentally fueled a black market because authorities are not enforcing them properly. By banning paid egg donation and allowing only basic reimbursement for travel and medical costs while demand for IVF treatment grows rapidly across India, the 2021 law created a severe shortage of legal donors. Rather than waiting for legal donors through registered egg banks, dishonest clinics turned to organised brokers to keep their businesses running and profits high.
The biggest weakness in the current system is how donors are verified and how clinics are monitored. Although the ART Act created a National Registry to track donors and stop repeat donations, brokers easily cheat the system using fake documents. In both Hyderabad and Badlapur, police seized dozens of forged Aadhaar cards with changed names, birth dates, and photos. This allowed clinics to register the same woman multiple times as a “first-time” donor on government portals. At the same time, state health departments rarely carry out surprise checks. When Telangana officials inspected twenty-seven of forty-four fertility clinics after the November raids, they found thirteen rule violations across seven hospitals, proving how easily clinics break the rules when nobody is watching.
From a medical and ethical standpoint, ignoring the once-in-a-lifetime donation rule puts women in serious danger. Repeated, unmonitored hormone treatments can cause Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS), a dangerous medical condition that can lead to severe fluid buildup, blood clots, kidney failure, and lasting hormonal or emotional damage. When hormone injections are given inside ordinary flats by brokers with no medical training, and when surgeries happen without proper counselling or follow-up insurance, doctors violate their most basic duty to protect patients from harm. Moreover, when a woman agrees to a risky medical procedure only because her father needs a kidney transplant or her family is drowning in debt, that decision is not truly free; it is desperation forced by poverty.
This deep moral concern is also echoed in the bioethical teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, which warns strongly against turning human reproduction and the human body into commercial products. In key Vatican documents such as Donum Vitae (1987) and Dignitas Personae (2008), the Church teaches that every human being possesses an inviolable dignity from the very beginning of life and must never be treated as a tool or a commodity to be bought and sold. While acknowledging the deep pain of couples struggling with infertility, Catholic teaching opposes in vitro fertilization and third-party egg or sperm donation because they separate the creation of life from the loving union of marriage and reduce human life to a laboratory product. From this perspective, harvesting eggs from impoverished women, especially through financial pressure and medical risk, is a grave offense against human dignity, turning both the vulnerable woman’s body and the beginnings of human life into objects of market trade.
While religious traditions like the Catholic Church reject assisted reproductive technologies altogether, the Indian state permits regulated fertility treatments under civil law, which makes the immediate enforcement of strict safeguards a matter of urgent social justice. To stop the abuse of poor women within the existing legal system, authorities must go beyond occasional police raids. First, the National Registry must require biometric Aadhaar verification, such as fingerprint or iris scans, rather than easily forged paper or digital ID cards, making it impossible to register the same woman twice. Second, the law must hold licensed doctors, clinic directors, and hospital owners strictly accountable for profiting from illegal retrievals, rather than punishing only low-level brokers who are often former victims themselves. Above all, society must confront the economic injustice and lack of affordable healthcare that push desperate families into these traps. Until poor families are protected from crushing medical bills, and until human dignity is placed firmly above commercial profit, vulnerable women will continue to pay the physical and moral price of a broken system.
