“Reproductive Assistance”.
A term which, at first glance, seems innocuous or even positive. Potentially referring to IVF or some sort of procedure that families will use when they have trouble conceiving naturally.
What this phrase actually hides is a 4.6 billion dollar industry where its main product is the bodies of primarily immigrant, brown, and poor women. This intimate biological process has evolved into a global enterprise, with the female body positioned at its very centre. Behind the clinical and ostensibly neutral language of “reproductive assistance” lies an industry deeply entangled in the horror logic of late-stage capitalism, colonial legacy, and gendered modern slavery.
The commodification of human eggs, or oocytes, have transformed them from a promise of life to a product for sale. This trade lays bare the violent systematic devaluation of marginalised, racialised, immigrant women, whose bodies are seen as raw material to be mined, managed, and discarded.
Globally, the market for human eggs is booming, feeding off economic desperation, reproductive anxiety, and global health crises. As instability deepens, the industry thrives, profiting from the bodies of women pushed to the margins and selling fertility as a luxury for the privileged. In countries such as Spain and Czechia, now widely regarded as central hubs in the “reproductive economy”, clinics scout women, predominantly immigrants or those from lower-income backgrounds, to undergo what is essentially human experimentation.
This experimentation? Weeks to months of hormonal injections, followed by invasive surgery to harvest human eggs. In exchange, these women are handed paltry sums, a fraction of the profit their bodies generate. These transactions are heavily medicalised and shrouded in altruistic language, a concerted effort to conceal an underlying market logic that grows increasingly extractive as demand continues to rise. The clinics, far from being a neutral actor, encourage exploitative fertility tourism and the deregulation of the system, moulded by neoliberal imperatives, prioritising market efficiency and consumer choice above ethical safeguards.
And it’s no surprise who the consumers of this “product” are. Affluent patients, generally from wealthy Western nations, are positioned as entitled consumers whilst economically vulnerable women become the invisible labour force sustaining the system.
These women, primarily from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe are recruited through coercion while their participation is framed as voluntary. Offers of employment and financial stability in Western nations—nations that have often destabilised these women's home economies—target the desperate and vulnerable. These women are transported, pressured into donation through debt or deception, and left with few resources or recourse. Human trafficking networks have begun to intersect with egg donation pathways, particularly in regions where legal oversight is weak or intentionally neglected.
The racial and colonial dimensions of the trade can also not be ignored. The bodies of women from lower socio-economic countries are mined like natural resources, their genetic “value” assessed by a market that echoes imperialist nations’ hunger for extraction. Colonialism did not end, it simply evolved. It is now embedded in every transaction where women’s bodies are stripped for parts to fulfil the reproductive desires of the privileged.
This system, like colonialism itself, relies on unequal power relations, dispossession, and the reduction of women to tools of production. This is not an industry detached from history—it is one manufactured by it.
And this violence isn’t confined to the egg trade. It is embedded in broader reproductive exploitation, where women's choices are dictated not by autonomy, but by economic survival. An obstetrician has told a 2024 Australian parliamentary inquiry (yes, this happens on our own soil) that hundreds of immigrant women seek abortions with her each year. Driven not by freedom, but to avoid breaching their visa conditions where pregnancy can mean punishment not protection.
Dr Trudi Beck, a GP in Wagga Wagga, described an “unseen population” of migrant women who undergo terminations they would not otherwise choose, because pregnancy would threaten their ability to work and meet minimum visa conditions in physical labour sectors. These women are cornered into medical procedures that sever them from choice over their bodies, not because they want to, but because capital has made their choices inconvenient.
This is forced reproductive control under the guise of policy compliance. The state and the market work together to dictate whose pregnancies are viable, and whose are not. Whose lives are worth accommodating, and whose are expendable for productivity. These women are not just abandoned; they are actively engineered into silence and compliance. Their labour is welcomed; their lives are not.
The risks they face—medical, financial, legal, psychological—are exacerbated by a near-total lack of post-procedure care or long-term monitoring. The line between consent and coercion is blurred to the point of erasure. And all the while, the egg donor, the pregnant worker, the brown woman with a temporary visa—she is used, minimised, and then forgotten.
In the status quo, the global oocyte trade remains a marketplace disguised as a medical clinic, and reproductive “choice” becomes a euphemism for economic coercion. Economically marginalised and racialised women aren’t allowed to make their own choices with their bodies, lest they become economic liabilities. This logic reflects global inequality, racial capitalism, and the enduring colonial ideology that some lives are worth more than others. And unless we recognise and confront this, the system will continue to thrive at the expense of the world’s most vulnerable.
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