Inside Nigeria’s unregulated human egg industry

In the booming fertility business, women donating their eggs face unfavourable conditions and health and safety risks.

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It was a hot afternoon in October 2019, and 22-year-old Joan* had just been crying in a ward of a private hospital in Mokola, a neighbourhood of Ibadan in southwestern Nigeria.

Seven days earlier, she had started taking hormone injections to stimulate her ovaries into producing mature eggs, part of the process to get her body ready so that the doctors could extract them.