Making Babies, Pushing Boundaries: The Great Greek Fertility Market

She had come to Athens in her teens and found a scene to suit her tastes in scruffy-but-trendy Gazi district. She styled herself as a punk and, with her cropped hair and soft features, could have passed for a beautiful boy playing at being a girl, or vice versa. As a kid, growing up in Bulgaria, she had a thing for toy soldiers. She was less fond of the pink lace dress that she was forced to wear for Christmas and special occasions.

It was always the same bars in Gazi that she went to, and the same crowd too. They all knew each other and they were looking for the same things - to flirt, have fun, forget. The vibe was intimate, uninhibited. Still, the approach from the barwoman came as a surprise. Ever fancied donating your eggs, she asked Lina - it's easy money and I know the right people.

While not quite the sort of overture one expected in a lesbian bar, it was not the first time that Lina had heard of the practice - girls she knew had done it. Soon enough, she was wondering if she should do it too. It's either that, said a friend who knew a thing or two about making money on the side, or go work as a call-girl - take your pick.

Lina first donated her ova at a fertility clinic at the age of 23. Over the next seven years, she would donate a further four times. Each cycle of donation involved ten days of hormone therapy, administered by daily injection to stimulate her ovaries to produce eggs that would be retrieved at the clinic under general anaesthetic. A selection of those ova would be fertilised to make embryos that would be assigned to one of the many thousands of clients from Europe and beyond that seek out Greece's fertility clinics every year, hoping for a baby. "It doesn't feel like giving birth," Lina told the Balkan Investigative...