DISCLAIMER: Today’s episode is paid content from our feature sponsor, who helps Inside Reproductive Health to deliver information for free, to you! Here, the Advertiser has editorial control. Feature sponsorship is not an endorsement, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Inside Reproductive Health.
This may be the most serious topic we’ve discussed on Inside Reproductive Health, and it is a vital conversation to be having in the fertility space. The buying and selling of human trafficked eggs.
Diana Thomas, CEO and Founder of The World Egg and Sperm Bank and an early recipient of donor egg IVF, addresses the concerning rise in trafficked eggs reaching clinics and patients, along with the associated legal and ethical concerns.
Diana talks about:
The spike in donor eggs from developing countries (And how many of them are flagged as high risk for human trafficking)
How victims are coached to amend their profiles to look upper class (Reducing suspicion of exploitation)
Specific examples of different egg donor agencies and banks where there’s contradicting information regarding donor information.
A new Human Trafficking Act (Including the legal and financial implications)
TWESB’s strict protocols to minimize the risk of providing trafficked eggs to their patients
Her checklist any clinic can use to help ensure they are not buying and selling trafficked eggs
Diana Thomas LinkedIn
The World Egg and Sperm Bank
Transcript
Diana Thomas 00:00
Prevalent isn't even a good enough word. It's flooded our markets. And it's amazing to me that doctors and radiologists and patients don't have a clue what's going on the certainly that everybody says well, the aids are cheaper from there. But those savings are not being passed on to the patient they're still paying $22,000 per cohort.
Sponsor 00:22
This episode was made possible by our feature sponsor The World Egg and Sperm Bank, head over to www.theworldeggandspermbank.com/protect and download their free due diligence checklist to ensure that your program only sells eggs from donors that have been safely and ethically protected. That's theworldeggandspermbank.com/protect. Today's episode is paid content from our feature sponsor who helps inside reproductive health to deliver information for free to you. Here the advertiser has editorial control. Feature sponsorship is not an endorsement and does not necessarily reflect the views of Inside Reproductive Health.
Griffin Jones 01:12
This is one of the most serious topics we've ever covered on the inside reproductive health podcast off the top of my head from what I can think of from 200 episodes. It's the most serious it has to do with the trafficking of young women and exploiting them to sell their oocytes unsafely at a profit a huge profit. To me, it seems the worst case scenario is this is something that's happening with hundreds, maybe even 1000s of cases. And the best case scenario, as far as I can tell is that clinics are very vulnerable to using and selling eggs from women who've been victims of trafficking because from what I see the chain of custody isn't secure enough. There's too much movement, too much uncertainty, I'm not qualified to say but my guest has done a lot more research in this area. Her name is Diana Thomas, you know, or is the founder and CEO of The World Egg and Sperm Bank. Not only was she among the very first of agencies and banks, she was among the very first patients to be the recipient of donor egg IVF. She found her own donor made her own contract had children from donor egg IVF then started doing that for other fertility doctors and other fertility clinics who recruited her to find other donors for their other patients. Diane talks about the changes that she made in 2014, 2015 as vitrification became more popular, but then people were stimulating differently. They were freezing differently. They were shipping differently. They're all these different spokes in the custody wheel. So her egg bank centralized everything stimulation shipping recruitment screening protocols gave a really tight bead on quality assurance around 2018 and 2019 is when Diana saw a really large spike of imported eggs coming into the UK and Canada and the United States from developing countries. Many of these countries had been flagged by the US State Department for being high risk for human trafficking. Diana says it's not just a correlation. There have been articles about very large arrests happening with human trafficking and coercion for egg donors. The most recent one at time of this episode Aug. 23, just happened on the Greek island of Crete. She references the pH dissertation of a whistleblower from a Ukrainian clinic who talks about how Ukrainian records are falsified. Women are forced to sign consents, they're pushed into doing far more retrievals than you would she gives one example where a woman did 24 Egg retrievals to an estimated 600 eggs 480 that are viable at cohorts of six maybe 40 children from one Ukrainian donor and according to the reports of the whistleblower, that donor was paid $100 per donation where the other parties including the criminals, but also including the clinics and egg banks made a lot more money than that. Danna talks about Ukrainian clinics trying to sell off eggs at $200 apiece because of their compliance issues with the FDA. So they sell through a Canadian cryobank Danna goes through examples from different egg donor agencies and banks, where there's contradicting information. She said she lives in one place. But then the other part of the profile she said she's Ukrainian doesn't have a green card yet. And another profile says that she's seeking asylum. She talks about how donors are coached to amend their profiles, so they see more upper class so that American Canadian and British and Australian recipients are less likely to suspect her exploitation. So as Diana what she does differently, she talks about the residency requirements for her donors. She talks about the identity requirements for donors, the multi-phase personality test that's required from each of her donors, the human trafficking protocol protocol that they have for their donors, how she can be so much more certain that their donated eggs are coming from women who have not been trafficked. There's of course huge ethical implications. There's legal implications down to the clinic and the provider Diana talks about a new human trap Thinking Act and the legal and financial implications from that. And I give a business and a public relations warning. Many of you are CEOs, many of your practice owners imagine trying to sell your practice. Imagine trying to sell your fertility network to another network or buy another network to go public with your network done all this marketing gotten all this by in about your mission and values. And a major media investigation reveals that donor eggs that you're using for big profit are coming from women who've been coerced and exploited and trafficked. The human concern comes first. This is something you have to look into The World Egg and Sperm Bank has a checklist for your due diligence for protecting yourselves from human traffic tags, protecting your patients from that ultimately protecting the donors. That checklist talks about ownership history, donor sources, chain of custody accountability, practice liabilities and donor care. Use that checklist as an agenda for meeting with your leadership team. You can get it on The World Egg and Sperm Bank website, we're gonna link to it on this episode page link to it in the ads we run with this episode, we'll link to it in the email that this episode comes out in. But do your due diligence because this could be a major threat to your company. Now on to my conversation with Diana Thomas, CEO of The World Egg and Sperm Bank. Ms. Thomas, Diana, welcome to the Inside Reproductive Health podcast.
Diana Thomas 06:17
Thank you excited to be here.
Griffin Jones 06:19
I could spend probably an entire episode just talking about your background. So I don't want to spend all of the time in there because we have an important topic to touch on an important topic that we should all be concerned about we that we should all be investigating and making sure that safeguards are in place that it isn't happening. But your background is really really interesting to me. So I want to give a little synopsis and you tell me if I got it right. But sounds like you were living in Canada in the mid 90s. It's around 1995. You need assisted reproductive technology, the waitlist in Canada for IVF is several months and no donors are available there at that time. You move back to Phoenix, Arizona, where you're originally from, they can do donor egg IVF. But they're not doing Ixy or anything and they don't have like their own egg donors available. They don't have banks that they're working with. So they tell you, yeah, sure, if you can find one, we'll we'll use that person's egg you recruit your own egg donor from the Arizona State campus. And then you write your own contract for for that there wasn't like third party contracts at that time. So you write that. And and you went, you decided to go with open identity from the very beginning. How close am I to having that, right?
Diana Thomas 07:54
Yeah, pretty close. Except I was in Canada and in the mid 80s when I actually started in IVs. So it was right at the beginning of really that then creation of the industry.
Griffin Jones 08:05
So you start you were you had gone through some cycles, but it was 1995 when you did your first donor cycle in in red. Yeah, Sona. Yes,
Diana Thomas 08:13
I went through phase one. Yes. Yeah. So your learning was after 15 years of Toronto.
Griffin Jones 08:19
You're learning everything on your own at this point as you're going through it. And then at that point, someone says to you, Hey, can you do that for our other patients? Was it the clinic that you had went to see? Did they tell other fertility doctors? How did fertility doctors start calling you and asking if you could find donors for their patients?
Diana Thomas 08:42
It did start at the clinic that I had conceived through. And I also can see through my second children, my twins through another clinic, but basically it was the doctors from those clinics calling me and then I don't know, we're just really spread. I started getting phone calls from intended parents, just begging me to help find downers.
Griffin Jones 09:04
In the beginning. Would you say that you were an agency rather than a bank?
Diana Thomas 09:09
Oh, absolutely. There. Yeah, there was no egg freezing at all at the time, not until 2005 2004. So it was it was a fresh donor agency that I started then.
Griffin Jones 09:21
And so it was about 2015 where you started to make your company into an egg bank.
Diana Thomas 09:29
Now we became an egg bank in 2004 was slow freeze technology. And we had our first baby that was documented on Good Morning America in 2005 through Frozen egg out of Lexington, Kentucky. So we began recruiting donors just for the bank. But at the time the slow free technology wasn't nearly as good I think pregnancy rates around 32% At that time, so we switched over to vitrification in 2009 And what were freezing eggs then at the same time, up until about 2010, I was also doing fresh donor cycles around the country, taking downers to different blog posts, and
Griffin Jones 10:12
So vitrification starts to take off. And then in 2014, I had read something where you said, you started to find out that quality couldn't be assured. And I think that has something to do with different eggs being vitrified at different clinics sold to different banks, and then being incentivized on as many retrievals as possible and tied to the sale of the donor egg. So can you tell us about what you started to see in 2014?
Diana Thomas 10:44
Well, you know, we were an egg bank, probably six or seven years before any other egg bank came onto the market. We were egg banks before. Actually I was I was a donor agency before there are any hands around guidelines. So we're now contracts. So as you know, there wasn't even FDA testing on donors at the time, in those early days. So I started to see that the business model that other people were forming, was to do outside networks retrieval, say contact various clinics to do their retrievals. And I tried that with a couple of clinics to start and I realized, there was no way to really control the quality i i couldn't depend on if I worked with this doctor, he would hyper stem the dollars that I worked with this doctor, they would only get five eggs, because they were afraid of high percent. It just there was no way to control the actual process for the donor. And because egg freezing was so very new at the time, not a lot of people knew how to do it. And we would send in our own embryologist to to freeze it at those network clients, but we still could not. We just couldn't track family limits, we couldn't do all the things we want it to do. So I said we just have to start a whole new business model. And that is a centralized model, which contains everything on location from recruiting, to stimulation to freezing, to shipping, and we could manage all the family limits all the testing, all the egg freezing, and all the shipping. So we ended up having incredibly good success rates doing it that way.
Griffin Jones 12:23
So that's what I was thinking of what happened in 2014 and 2015. So by 2015, you are doing everything the same way protocols screening stem, vitrification storage, the way you ship that's all uniform across the board.
Diana Thomas 12:39
Correct. Same staff, same experience, people. Yep, same protocols.
Griffin Jones 12:45
So it this time, you're really starting to build quality assurance that is locked down. And because of that, you can probably see when ever there's some variance in that quality, or if there are gaps in the QA piece of it. And then you start to see a trend happening in 2018 and 2019 have of eggs coming from other countries. Tell us about that. Or maybe not even other countries, but particularly from developing countries.
Diana Thomas 13:18
Yeah, I I really was rather unaware of it until probably two years ago. But I know all of the reading and research I've done it did start much earlier. In fact, there's a clinic in Chicago that's identified in the book, The Red market, that talks about donors being shipped into Chicago and retrieved and then sent back home. So it's been around a while it's just become so incredibly overwhelming. I mean, it's right now developing country, extra developing countries and sperm now, by the way, is really flooding just flooding the US market and the Canadian market and the UK market. And it's really a lot more information has come out about what's going on behind the scenes. That's truly alarming. very alarming. Why
Griffin Jones 14:09
2018 2019? What was it about that time period that this trend started to happen?
Diana Thomas 14:16
I think it was the globalization, the economic globalization and IVF really ticked up. And most of this, most of this is really driven by global funding and global purchases of US companies that Canadian companies and UK companies. So yeah, they have strong ties in European countries and other countries. So they're, they could see a huge profit margin by doing it this way. And I'd love to give you an example. If you're ready to hear one anytime. How much money people make up first.
Griffin Jones 14:49
Yeah, hold on to that example for one second, because I want to ask you, you said that it's alarming. Why is it alarming?
Diana Thomas 14:55
Well, any human trafficking should be alarming to anyone. There The fact that all of these eggs are coming from, from countries well known for human trafficking, human trafficking stems from organized crime. And that you can go on to the government, US Department of State and see annual reports published about every country's human trafficking behaviors. And statistics is well known and well documented. There, they estimate 60,000 Russian women are human trafficked a year and prior to the war in Ukraine, at least 6000 Ukrainian women were and those are the ones that are reported. So it's not a thing. It just happens once in a while, or maybe one donor is treated poorly. I know, the 1000s that are listed on websites, you know, downer concierge, boasts 25,000 donors.
Griffin Jones 15:50
So there's alarm because these two things are happening in parallel one, you have a big rise in eggs coming from developing countries. And they also happen to be countries where human trafficking is a really big problem. And so
Diana Thomas 16:07
It's been documented, as well, there have been people have documented these specific donors, and specific instances of that of this. And I have plenty of references I could make to some of those documents. But it's also that's yeah, human trafficking is it's everybody should just stop there. But then there's also who's telling recipients that this is going on, and who can validate any of the data, medical data. There have been two recent arrests that show that the the medical data is falsified. For egg donation for genetic material being sold to the west. One article just came out this month 71 donors that were rescued from an organized trafficking ring and gray. So I think that, you know that the cycle we don't understand is these women are trafficked. And they're trafficking with fraudulent promises of vacations or jobs or or were and then they're putting the dancing clubs and prostitution, with Ed backing on the side. So do we really think that these some of these women don't have HIV? Who, whose blood is being tested? Who's Who's tracking the chain of custody for any of the testing that's gone on in Europe that each and then track that the actual documents down much less? Now, the chain of custody especially? Well, I'll wait for you to ask more questions.
Griffin Jones 17:40
Tell us about the example you're thinking of,
Diana Thomas 17:43
Well, if there's a great documents, if people are really, really don't believe this is going on by pulling up the lens, the Lascaux who's did her dissertation and Indiana University in 2021, and lived in Ukraine, and worked at a Ukrainian egg bank for three years. So she came back with all kinds of interviews and documentation and explanation of how the process works and how records are falsified and how donors are, are called the consent sign these consent so they will can't donate. They're not going to get paid or just the coercion an inherent in almost every step of the process. And coercion of vulnerable women is a definition of human trafficking. So Natalia, for example, was interviewed by Polina and she donated so far and 2021 24 times all the records that we get them on these women's say, donation up to up to six times. And they were in four or five different countries, she got paid about $100 per donation. So that's $2,400, she produced around 600 eggs on an average cycle, maybe 480 will mature out of those 24 cycles. So that those 280 couples, six cohorts of six those 280 couples around the world, meaning there's probably 40 children from this one Boughner that's just the egg side of it, but the money side of it is she gets walks away with $2,400. The broker pimps that bring them in and the doctors that retrieved the eggs are making $7,500 per cohort of six. And I know that I've got emails from people offering me those prices. So they're making $600,000 Right there. Then they sell the eggs to us egg banks and Canadian egg banks and Canadian doctors who turn around and sell them for 20 to $2,000 to their patients. So the doctors in this country and the UK and Canada are making $20,000 off to off of a single board of eggs. So around this stellato was worth around $2.6 million. And we are supporting organized crime in that purchase.
Griffin Jones 20:07
How does the report know discover that this donor had did 24 retrievals? When you know, it may have been reported that she did four, six, how did how did they discover that she had done 24.
Diana Thomas 20:21
She works in a clinic that sent her out. And that was she wasn't the only one she documented. She documented a number of them. I just picked that one out as an example. So some were up to 15 times, some were more than that. They go they go to Israel, they go to the US, they go to Spain, and they retrieve in Ukraine.
Griffin Jones 20:44
So this pullin of Valeska Am I saying her name correctly? Polenta malesko. She's a whistleblower. She works at a Ukrainian clinic or worked at a Ukrainian clinic. And this is what she's observed from the patients coming through.
Diana Thomas 20:57
Well, it's also her PhD dissertation. So it wasn't just journalism. See now, and she didn't get her PhD, she had to defend this dissertation.
Griffin Jones 21:09
So you have someone that is getting $100, that when we know that the total compensation is a lot more than that, and that's going to different people, it's going to the people doing the retrievals is going to people that are bringing her in. And that's also way more than it's way more retrievals than we would expect to be safe for, for anyone, right? And so So are we are we mostly worried about this happening with women that are in these particular countries? So if it's Ukraine, or Georgia or Russia, or are we worried about the trafficking that's happening to Ukrainian, Georgian Russian women? Or are we also worried about people that are being trafficked into those countries like Turkmenistan, or the UAE or other countries where people are being removed from and brought into which is it Are they are they both are concerned,
Diana Thomas 22:10
all are concerned, because they're all forms of human trafficking and where we're supporting organized crime by buying those eggs, and supporting the cycle of violence and coercion with women around the world. It's also, if you look at the US Department of State report on Spain, for example, it's considered one of the worst locations for trafficking women into Spain. And they're coming now from Bolivia and Chile and Venezuela and Brazil, and Colombia and Nigeria. And that's it's all documented in the US Department of State records that this is going on. So these women get into these places, they also document that they're confined in apartments. So they're used for prostitution, you know, it's a model that the organized crime is calling the renewable resource model. So these women are considered renewable resources because you can use them all up and use them again and again and again. Prostitution, modeling, dancing, egg retrieval, surrogacy, the one that was arrested this month was for all three of those things. Prostitution, surrogacy and egg retrievals
Griffin Jones 23:21
Can you tell us about that arrest? I was unfamiliar with this story. Oh,
Diana Thomas 23:25
yeah. It just came out on August 20. Around that time, I think. Yeah, I think I've gotten on my on my LinkedIn of that. But basically, doctors, secretaries, embryo embryologist organized crime, in particular persons were all arrested for because of 98 women that were being used for prostitution, surrogacy and egg retrievals for egg donation. And in the arrest, they found all the medical documents falsified, consents falsified. It was they rescue these women from confinement? Was this also in Ukraine. Now there it was in Greece, and which is really interesting. It's the second arrests, it was large like that the other one was in 2019. There, but there were women from Russia, from Ukraine, from Latvia of Georgia, and other countries that were sent to grace to be retrieved.
Griffin Jones 24:24
And so and Cyprus is an area that has been dinged for human trafficking in the past, and neighbor to Greece. And so women are both vulnerable in these countries, and then they're vulnerable from other countries that go through these countries. You have have I've given talks before where you go through profiles of different donor egg banks, and there's contradicting information in the profiles you know, the things will say like, she's in London or she's in Florida, but they Then you read through the rest of the profile, and she's in the Ukraine or she doesn't have a green card, it says, Green Card pending does. So it's like, Well, is she? Is she actually in Florida? Or like, or are they in Florida? Like they're and and you know, there's ones where it's like it says, seeking asylum. It says that in the profile. And so tell us about these examples?
Diana Thomas 25:25
Well, I mean, there are 1000s of them. And you know, I, people say to me, Well, who's doing that in the US? And I basically because I would say who isn't? We really, I believe that almost every egg bank is and they're also shipping them to Canada to cannamd cryo bank. And we had somebody approached us at ESHRE, from Ukraine, trying to sell to dump the eggs for $200 because the FDA is coming down on them, and said, you have to buy them from Ken Ham cryo. So send your patients there, we'll ship all of our eggs to Canada. Because it's there's no FDA in Canada. So there's no there's no, there's absolutely no verification of the of the testing that's going on from these donors. So they go from, you know, Ukraine, to Poland to Spain, to a bank in the US to a Canadian egg bank in and out of tanks. And people are buying them and have no clue where they originally from. And there's no disclosure at when they're when they're purchased by recipients. That that any of this is going on, people assume that if it's in the United States or Canada, it's legal and it's healthy, and it's safe.
Griffin Jones 26:43
That seems to be a big chain of custody. Yeah, that can be easily obscured. Because yeah, it's it seems to me that, that you can feel like, Oh, this is the source, but you don't actually know the source because it didn't come from this agency or this clinic and get shipped to this clinic or this agency. It was brokered by yet another intermediary that was trying to unload Oh sites for reasons that you thought, Oh, we're in Ukraine, and things are really bad. And we're so we're going to try to sell eggs at a discount, and but you have to go through this other person. And ultimately, the patient really isn't aware of, of that long chain of custody. How familiar are the clinicians with that long chain of custody? Do they know where eggs are coming from?
Diana Thomas 27:35
I really don't think so. No one has really stopped to ask the question until recently, we've been trying to educate people about asking questions, which is why I've done a checklist for people to start asking questions. In order to determine where the ACE came from, or or if they have answers. I did an online survey in April, just a quick, quick and dirty to embryologist Do you know the source of the anchor warming? Only 33% of them and the end was only 200. So it's not it wasn't huge, but it's a pretty good indication. embryologists are really honest, if they do answer directly. And of those people that that did. Now, they knew that 50% of them they thought came from the US. But that's because the US egg bank name is on the shipment. And the other 50% knew they came from Eastern Europe, because they sponsor a clinic, or from the UK, which is really just another transit country because they don't retrieve eggs and send them out from the UK, and, and Spain. So people are aware that it's happening, and they're entering that data as a soccer clinic and the sorry.
Griffin Jones 28:48
And so I think that the any egg bank would say, Oh, well, they do say because you go to their website. In fact, one of the examples that you had in, in your talk, you point out all you show the map of where they're getting their donors from from a month. I think it's like 20, they say 20,000 donors available is on. And of course right on their homepage. They say each of our egg donors is required to complete a rigorous application and screening process prior to being added into our database for their safety and for the health and general health of your future baby. We document and verify every egg donors identity, education and mental physical and reproductive health. Why is that wrong? How can how can it how they're all going to say the same thing? What in your view is insufficient about what they're doing?
Diana Thomas 29:49
Well, it's all a lie. They're marketing to the Western market, which you go to a Polina dissertation she talks about how the session with the psychologist is how to how to amend their profile to make the look like educated white middle class women so that people in the Western world don't feel guilty, getting eggs for poor abuse women who are not educated. So they falsify their talents, as you saw in one of the donors who had spoke five languages, including ancient Latin, played jazz and classical piano, and had a real estate degree, but she's a freelance model. It you know, really I? And they are saying they're not lying about any of that stuff. When you have done people getting arrested for false records, and who, who actually validates any of it? How do you know the eight you can actually the blood you get is from the same donor who's anxious you get? Because they say so is that gonna hold up in court is that going to hold up to the FDA and FDA audit will look at their website, they say they do all is, if they want to steal it, it's it's, and yet, people like us, who actually do it all the right way, are held accountable, and can be prosecuted for not following the law.
Griffin Jones 31:15
I know what's going to happen after this episode comes out, people are gonna hear it, CEOs of networks are going to hear it, doctors are gonna hear it lab directors are gonna hear it and they're gonna say, Oh, crud, they're gonna go to your website, they're gonna download the checklist, and then they're gonna go to whoever they're buying eggs from right now. And they're gonna say, how do we know that you're that you're not going to? Or how do we know that you're actually safeguarding and making sure that these are from donors who are properly verified, who are safeguarded or not traffic? And those egg banks are gonna inevitably going to say, we this is what we do, we've got it all under control. Are they lying, in your view? Or is there something that those egg banks aren't doing? Even if they have good intentions to properly verify the chain of custody?
Diana Thomas 32:08
Well, the question is, are you going to stick your clinic reputation on that? When when a baby is born and out to your clinic with HIV? Are you going to say, well, they told me, I believe them? There is no source documentation that can be discovered in a court of law. You know, they there's documentation that the stuff is falsified? And do they do it for every person? What the question is who, who is a third party that's not making money off this, this auditing them? There is nobody. So when they say that they are FDA registered? Yeah, you can be FDA registered, and the FDA has this wonderful little loophole that's abused by Western clinics is that it says if you sponsor he sponsor that clinic in Ukraine, you're verifying your personally stating you believe that they're actually doing FDA compliance. So they send the eggs over, but there's no documentation. And if they do get documentation, how do you know the chain of custody for the blood work that was done? But that when an f1, and f2 agent goes to your lab, what are they looking for, they're looking for, for real proof that there's infectious disease testing going on for this particular set of A's. And that that's just not going to be there?
Griffin Jones 33:33
What would proper identity verification look like?
Diana Thomas 33:36
Well, I'm not sure that really matters when you traffic, your trafficking, whether you identify them correctly or not, you know, the act of trafficking, supersedes all else. Because the act of trafficking is is against the law and is punishable. And if it doesn't mean that you're not trafficking, because you bought the eggs you didn't know she was trafficked. You buy stolen goods, you have to return them. It's it you are accountable. You're liable. You're transferring those eggs into your patient. You're the last person to say well, yeah, I trusted them over there. I believe that and how, how do they know? I mean, we're talking about Ukraine, but they're getting eggs to Bolivia and Chile and all different sets of all different countries. So they believe all those doctors, they just believe everybody. That's okay. You that's what's going on. When what is documented, there's so much human trafficking going on in those places. There's specific instances of it. It's just all over the place all over the internet, if you want to better the US Department of State.
Griffin Jones 34:42
Yeah, especially in countries that are war torn like Ukraine or bad state actors like Russia, where no one trusts what's coming out of Russia typically. And so why would you trust the so if you didn't trust the Olympics, if you didn't trust fraud and You know, involvement in in other countries and, and and sabotaging other people's internet infrastructure? And then, but but you're going to say no, but for sure we know that they're safely doing egg donation. Yeah.
Diana Thomas 35:17
Any organized crime drug lords run Bolivia and Colombia? You know, it's not really a disconnect there.
Griffin Jones 35:26
Yeah, it seems it seems too high risk for for my taste to be having those eggs come from other places especially because to your point, you could have the proper identity verification, but that it okay this is the donor Diana Thomas but we didn't know that Griffin Jones or someone else didn't make her come here and is stealing her compensation and then forcing her to do that over and over again and, and other things. And so what is it about what you're doing at the World egg and sperm bank that you feel very confident that we know our donors aren't coming from human draft trafficked places, we know that they're not being coerced into doing this, we know exactly who they are, where the eggs are coming from, where they're going, what is it that you're doing differently?
Diana Thomas 36:19
Well, first of all, we do everything in one location. So we have one building, every single donor comes through our door, we see them, we know them, we take their ID, which is usually a passport and a driver's license. And another form of ID if we can they are interviewed here they are interviewed independently outside of here by psychologists. They do MMPI to show that they're whether they're lying or not. They're also interviewed by doctors that are also on contract outside of us. So we're not trying to manipulate the outcome. And anybody who comes in the store from the United States, we only use donors that are US donors who are residents, because you have to be able to ask them back, if you're going to follow family limits and international laws. We actually limit our donations to 10 families worldwide for egg and sperm. So these women come in, we know who they are. But we also these women have opportunity. They're educated, they have an opportunity for other work. They have legal support if they feel that we're doing something wrong. And every document and every person and procedure we do in here can be discovered in a court of law. So we are accountable from beginning to end for our donors. All of your donors are us owe them. Ali, I think we've had, we have had a few Canadian donors, but I would say in the end, 10 years, we've had like three.
Griffin Jones 37:50
And then they're all donating at the lab in Phoenix,
Diana Thomas 37:54
all of them are retrieved in our one location. And they're frozen here. And they're shipped from here. And so there's no other how we ship tail, there's no excess handling of the eggs, they go from our lab, to the clinics lab.
Griffin Jones 38:10
So you can be a lot more sure of who they are and where they're coming from. When you said MMPI that was the first I heard of that you said that it helps to detect if they're, if they're telling the truth or not. Tell us more about what that is, is the first time I'm hearing of it.
Diana Thomas 38:30
Yeah, I started it when I started working with egg donors in the 90s. But it's MMPI is multi phasic personality disorder tasks that psychologists use. So it's a, you know, 700 questions that you have to answer in an hour. So it detects consistency. Or if you're misrepresenting yourself or you're trying to make, make yourself look to do but it's analyzed in a program that psychologists have been using for decades and decades, and identifies people that have compulsive lying, or they're borderline schizophrenic or their various disorders that show up in that testing.
Griffin Jones 39:07
Is that the same thing as the Minnesota some Yes, yes, we have now, it was like 561 is okay, I just was so I've taken that before years ago, probably 20 years ago. It's a 567 questions. I think it took me way longer than our if I recall correctly, I think it took me like three different hour sessions to do it. Now. I'm a slow test taker. But so when when or every single donor is doing this?
Diana Thomas 39:36
Yeah, and they're only given an hour, that's part of the testing the parameters of the testing, because they don't want you to think about all the responses too long. That's that's kind of the whole idea, but and they'll ask the same question for you know, 20 different ways. It you know, and you you tend to go through very quickly so your answers are very spontaneous. And you're doing this forever. Every single donor are just so all of them. I've done it for 25 years. Wow.
Griffin Jones 40:07
So is anybody else doing that specific test for their donors that,
Diana Thomas 40:12
you know, I think there used to be some people that did it, I, I really haven't kept up with what other people are doing to be frank with. So I suspect they're doing that or some version of it, there's another version that's not quite as intense as well, so I think and then there's people who just sit there and talk to them for half an hour, and they write up a paragraph and that's it, which is really probably most of them. But the psychology you know, interview in Ukraine was documented as being a how to how to doctor your profile meeting and the consents. Actually, in the law state that purse traffic that's person a person that is traffic, and signs a consent, that consent is entirely invalid.
Griffin Jones 41:02
Because they want to Doctor their profile, because if they seem more affluent if they seem like they're upper class or upper middle class, then you kind of reason by proxy, I heard you say in your talk, that they it's well, you know, if they've studied at university, and they have a master's or, or they have, maybe not even those, but they speak six languages, one of them, one of which is ancient Latin, and they've studied philosophy, and they they're a jazz pianist, and concert violinist and all these other things than you think, Oh, they can't be coming from downtrodden conditions.
Diana Thomas 41:39
It's it's kind of appeals to our western culture. We don't like abuse. We don't like human trafficking. Most of us haven't been exposed to it at all. It's, it's hard to even accept that this is happening right under our noses. And people are going to start being held accountable for it. And I wish people would listen and not get in trouble over it. But if we're going to keep sponsoring, organized crime, the aids are going to keep coming until somebody really gets in trouble over. But it is a way for us to feel comfortable that that these women are not being trafficked.
Griffin Jones 42:16
The women in some of these other countries are being coached to to elaborate and fabricate on their donation profiles, where you're putting them through a pretty rigorous personality test to make sure that this is who you say you are, and that, you know, some of these other personality disorders are screened away.
Diana Thomas 42:38
And it's also somebody outside of my organization. She's an independent psychologists. So she's got her reputation and her license to protect so she's not lying to tell me what I want to hear. Lie to tell me the truth.
Griffin Jones 42:55
Are there is there anyone else any other egg banks that you know of that that all of their donors are US residents?
Diana Thomas 43:02
is prevalent isn't even a good enough word. It's flooded our markets. And it's amazing to me that doctors and radiologists and patients don't have a clue what's going on? That certainly that everybody says well the answer cheaper from there. But those savings are not being passed on to the patient. They're still paying $22,000 per cohort. And they and they're getting something they don't really know what they're getting now.
Griffin Jones 43:31
So you are have a screening level that seems to be above and beyond you can point to a couple of things that that are actual differentiators. They're not superlatives, like we have the most rigorous screening testing is we can say all of our donors are US residents, we can say that every single one of our donors gets this MMPI test, we can say that we check all of their documentation. Do you have any other assurances for making sure that they're not coerced, though? So imagine the MMPI helps with that. And if there are US residents, we know they're not coming from other countries. But trafficking can still happen in the United States. Do you have any other assurances for for knowing that this person wasn't brought in by a pimp or an abusive partner or some other organized crime person,
Diana Thomas 44:24
We have a an official human trafficking protocol. Every dollar that comes in and is given a cup to urinate in, is tall to put a red.on The cup if they're being coerced to come in? Yeah, Firdous and Australia just did a modern human trafficking protocol for their egg bank for their clinic. So people are starting to come around to seeing that you have to mitigate it somehow.
Griffin Jones 44:50
So you take them away. Do you take them away from whoever they came in? I noticed when I went into the labor and delivery ward early or this summer that I was in, they took my wife first. And I hung out in the waiting room and then and then they came and got me and there's Are you safe? You know, where you brought here on your own? Do you feel safe to go home? Do you know all of these sorts of things? And so how do you? How do you sort of coach the woman on what the red dot means?
Diana Thomas 45:23
We actually bring them in the back away from the, if there's anybody with them, that we discussed this in the back the nurses and the doctors do, when they're doing their ultrasounds, and they're taking their urine sample, if anyone were to say, I am not comfortable going home with him, or something's wrong, we will take them into the back of the building and call the police. And, you know, that's all we can do, really. But we've never had that happen. And I've gone through at least $30,000 in my life. But you know, we also do reimbursement sheets, so we know where they work, we know what their income is, when I have somebody come in and says, I need to pay next month's rent, it's a no go. That's that, to me, is taking advantage of economic vulnerability.
Griffin Jones 46:13
Which your standards of course, are higher, which I think is good. By the way, Dan, I think that's ethical. That so because you could argue that's a form of economic coercion, like, is she really consenting to donate her eggs, if she absolutely has to feed her firstborn, or if she has to make rent or any number of things pay off a debt that's going to send her in a bankruptcy. And so you're you're checking for this and where I just can't believe that's the case in many of these other countries. And, and, and in many of these other countries, that the threat of what living to paycheck to paycheck actually means is greater than it is here. And I'm not saying it isn't, it isn't a big threat to live paycheck to paycheck here. But one, people do it more in other countries and to what it actually means is that you don't eat. Yeah, I lived in Bolivia, I lived in Bolivia in 2014 and 2015. And poverty in Bolivia means that you don't get you don't put food on the table that night. And and so if there aren't different social safety nets, and so simply by virtue of having donors from other countries, you simply couldn't have that same level of assurance of what we might call economic coercion, because they do have that economic threat. It is more present. And it's more dangerous. And generally speaking.
Diana Thomas 47:52
Well, true. And I you know, I see your point, I think that sometimes I hear the argument that that we do it here in the US to the point is, I think that's a red herring and you hit it right on the head. The Social Network is here to rescue people who do fall into those pits. I mean, if she had no food, could she go to a homeless shelter? Could she? Are there leaves? You know, she educated she? Could she get another job? Does she have legal remedies for if she was abused here, or she felt she was coerced? It's so different. When people have support systems built into our social network, as you saying,
Griffin Jones 48:30
Yeah, I don't want to belabor the point. But I think a couple of people might listen to say, No, it is still bad here. And as it can be bad here at different points. I'm telling you, it's nothing like what it is in these other countries. I'm telling you, you're poor here means that there you're you're living in public housing, and it's rough and appliances aren't working. And sometimes utilities aren't working and, and there's there's lots of crime and all of those things are serious dangers. What poor means in Bolivia is that is a dirt floor with a tin roof. And you there is no there's no there's no public transit that you can even just get get a bus pass for there's no soup kitchens, there's no there's no homeless shelters, at least in the rural areas. And so, you know, this is the case and a lot of different points. So I won't I won't belabor that anymore, but I know somebody's probably thinking, Oh, no, it's still just is but I'm telling you, it isn't. And, and so Okay, so you've you've, you have these checks and balances in place. And thank goodness, no one has had to use the red dot but you're taking the women away to make sure that that they're not being trafficked. out what let's talk a little bit. We talked about what egg banks can do. We talked about what what, what you're doing. Let's maybe talk a little bit about what else clinics can be doing because and you alluded to this checklist, which I think people should go to your website To download, we will have it on the page for this episode, we will link to it in the email that we send the episode out into. And, and people should go because every CEO is going to want their team to look at this, every lab director is going to want to look at it every practice owner is going to want to look at it. But let's talk about more about what what happens to clinics if they don't have these things in place and and what they can do to protect themselves from using human traffic DAGs.
Diana Thomas 50:35
Well, you know, I suppose just not using them at all, it's really the only way to be safe. How to How can you say that this cohorts probably okay, but this cohort isn't? I don't think you can do that. I don't think it's a matter of protecting yourself from traffic degas's from third world countries or developing countries. You can't change the whole social system and other countries. So the only way you can stop it is by not supporting it by paying for the eggs. You know, there's the the the intendant parents have no clue this was going on, you imagine telling your child you know, an 18 year sorry, you know, your donor was a prostitute. And there's her Baba records were blown up. So I can't tell you anything about her. You know, I mean, it's just the down, you know, this is not going to just stop with transferring eggs, it's going to be the pregnancy. So children born, the children who want contact with the donor, as time goes on, I think that there'll be a lot of losses if people are not more careful about this, and just don't engage in it. The FDA is catching on. And you know, I think it's a disservice to our own clientele, I mean, our own profession and our own, the people that we really want to help that I know that every clinic and Doctor really wants to help. Because they can't they can't double check any of that stuff. And they should stop pretending that they can. I don't know if I answered that question or not. It's it's kind of just goes on and on. You can't. There's no way to do it halfway. I guess.
Griffin Jones 52:21
You really can't use eggs from these other countries you have to use those from that are where there's there's one source where it's one country, are there other countries beyond the US that you feel are safe. You mentioned that sometimes us Canadian citizens said the US Canada or their other countries were okay. If if donors are coming from these areas that then that safe? Is it only developing countries that you're concerned about?
Diana Thomas 52:50
Now? I mean, I think you can work for donors in Australia and the UK, but the chances of doing that are pretty low because of their own laws around reimbursements. I I don't have any trouble recruiting donors, I have more donors, you know, I can I have 200 that are already all banked I could I could double that in six months if I wanted to. So when people say that I you know, we've got to do this, there just aren't enough donors. I just have to disagree and see, you're doing it because you're making a ton of money easily. And you don't know how to recruit donors. You don't you don't put three or four staff people to do this 100% of the time, which is what it takes. It takes a lot of time and effort, especially to get it right, legally. And worldwide, which is what we do. We follow laws and at least six different countries. So everything has to be really marked.
Griffin Jones 53:47
Donor sources is one of the areas of the checklist that you also have, you also have an accountability in which you list out specifically what that means with CDC with us. It means where were they sent prior to us that also kind of dovetails with the with the part of the checklist that you have for chain of custody, where we're monitoring who maintains the chain of custody who's who's handling who's doing the auditing, then you have an area for patient care and practice liabilities, the risks that they've been informed of the family limits, and then you also have section for donor care, talking about how to know if the donor has been stimulated more than recommended, etc. Tell us about some of these these other areas and what practices should be concerned about?
Diana Thomas 54:40
Yeah, I think, you know, again, it's been documented everywhere in many places, including the dissertation that when a donor is hyper stem, she comes back to the clinic banging on the door and they say tough your donations over a good luck go find go get better somewhere. So they're not cared for any Any repetitive egg donation over, you know that many repetitive egg donations has long term consequences for these women, the clinics, you know, they're, they can't verify the records, they can't verify the profiles, they can't verify the ID, all they do those who have eggs sitting in front of them. And they feel that well with the patient went there and and ordered them, what am I going to do, I just have to warm them and transfer them. But the fact is, when a doctor takes eggs and warms them and fertilizes them, and puts them back in a patient, he saw last chance to rectify a problem that will that could happen to that woman and that child, he's participating, he's condoning the whole process, if he transfers those embryos into a patient, he, they're not going to go and sue a broker or a pimp in some other country, they're going to sue the doctor here in the lab and the staff. It's you know, so it's, there are huge liabilities, I think, and they just haven't, it's kind of shown up yet, because it hasn't been around as, as commonly as it is now, very long. So we'll see what happens in the next six months to a year. And if the FDA is already tracking down the Ukrainian eggs, they're gonna be asking people and clinics when they do their audits, to find out to show them the chain of custody. For the FDA testing.
Griffin Jones 56:29
I'm gonna give you the final thought I want to conclude with my final thought, because you're the expert in this area where I can shed some useful advice to those listening is that if this were connected to your clinic, and in something big happens, it can be one of those irredeemable public relations, travesties. So you're talking about the human concern, our listeners should be deeply concerned with the human concern, I'm sharing the business concern here. On top of that, the human concern comes first. But I'm sharing the business concern on top of that, that many of you are CEOs that are listening, and many of you are practice owners. But whether you're a practice owner of a six doc group in, in a city here, or whether you are the CEO of a network that is getting ready to be bought by another network, or to buy another network or to go public, imagine something like this coming out from the New York Times, that comes back to your clinic, this is something that you absolutely have to look into recommend you start by going and reading through the checklist, going to The World Egg and Sperm Bank site reaching out to Diana to find out more about this, but you absolutely have to look into it. Because if something like there was a an article that came out last year from the New York Times, they were surrogates, now they must raise children. And it talks about, you know, coercion, and human trafficking and surrogacy in Cambodia. But if an article like that comes out and links someone to your clinic, oh, and by the way, it was these clinics in the United States, these networks that purchased these types of eggs, that is a really bad thing to happen, especially if you're a mission driven organization, many of these fertility clinic networks, market themselves on the missions that they're building themselves toward, and that would betray any core values that, that they're open to build their, their brand. And upon and the the, I'm looking at the article that you talked about previously, Dinah, where it's police arrest members of a baby trafficking ring on Crete, Greece, if any of this is is linked back to your clinic, it's really bad. Again, the human concern comes first. But that's the business public relations concern. I strongly recommend everyone to go to your website and read this checklist. Again, we're gonna link to it in the show notes. We're gonna link to it on the show page, we're gonna link to it in the email that goes out it will be on The World Egg and Sperm Bank's website. And if you still need more help getting in touch with with Diana and finding those resources, I will I will connect you personally. But Diana, now, please. I want to leave it to you to conclude.
Diana Thomas 59:36
Well, I you know, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I'm actually really trying to partner with clinics to help them out. So they aren't in that situation with this education. But there's also another piece you know, the the US has ratified the UN Human Trafficking protocol. And in it there's also punishment that comes along with being arrested and convicted including repatriation of every Hanna you made from that Trafficking Act. So there is also a financial piece to this for networks, global networks I so I really hope people are listening. It's it's something we can reverse. I think we all love our patients who really want to take care of our patients and give them healthy babies. So we have to be aware of these things to move forward.
Griffin Jones 1:00:23
Thank you very much for coming on the podcast and and sharing light on this topic. I look forward to hearing more about the follow ups and about the people that reach out to you afterward. Thanks for coming on the inside reproductive health podcast.
Diana Thomas 1:00:38
Thanks for the opportunity.
Sponsor 1:00:40
This episode was made possible by our feature sponsor The World Egg and Sperm Bank, head over to www.theworldeggandspermbank.com/protect and download their free due diligence checklist to ensure that your program only sells eggs from donors that have been safely and ethically protected. That's theworldeggandspermbank.com/protect. Today's episode is paid content from our future sponsor who helps inside reproductive health to deliver information for free to you. Here the advertiser has editorial control. Feature sponsorship is not an endorsement and does not necessarily reflect the views of Inside Reproductive Health.