Professor Raphael Ron-El, head if the In Vitro Fertilzation Clinic at Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in Israel, and Dafna Komarovsky, a technician there, were among 11 people arrested by Romanian police for illegal trafficking human eggs and selling them to Israeli couples who traceled there so the women could be artifically inseminated.. Ron-El is considered a leading fertility specialist in his native country.
According to police, employees at a Bucharest fertility clinic (later identified as the Med New Life Clinic by journalists including an AP photographer) harvested ova from Romanian woman aged 18-30, paying them between $450-$600, then selling it for $2,255-$3005.
Last November, a Romanian court sentenced four other doctors, Yair and Harry Miron, Genya Ziskind and Nathan Levitt in absentia to five years in prison for an unrelated egg-trafficking case. All have appealed their sentences from Israel.
Here in the US fertility clinics often pay donors as much as $8,000 for their eggs. The women are given follicle stimulating hormones to stimulate their ovaries, a process that can take 10-14 days. When she is ready, the eggs are then harvested via needle inserted through the vagina.
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