SEOUL - South Korean police have made their first arrest under a new bioethics law, capturing a man they suspect illegally sold human eggs to infertile couples in South Korea and Japan, a police spokesman said on Monday.
Police raided four Seoul area hospitals on Sunday following the arrest on Saturday of a 28-year-old man identified by his family name Kim, who tried to entice women to sell their ova to help them pay off debts such as massive credit card bills, the spokesman said.
Police also charged, but did not detain, two university students and a housewife suspected of illegally selling their ova through Kim.
In addition, police are investigating cases involving 10 other people suspected of using the Internet to act as brokers to sell ova from South Korean women to infertile women in Japan.
South Korea enacted a new bioethics law in January that was aimed at bolstering its stem cell research while at the same time raising the bioethical standards. The law allows for therapeutic cloning for stem cell research and bans cloning to produce humans.
It also prohibits the commercial trade in ova or sperm, providing punishments of up to three years in jail for brokers and up to two years in jail for donors.
Police said they suspect the broker Kim of setting up deals through the Internet where he acted as a middleman offering women about 3 million won ($2,857) to 4 million won to sell their reproductive cells, which he would then sell at a profit to women looking to conceive.
He arranged for the sellers and donors to meet at hospitals, where he supposedly persuaded staff that the egg donation was for research purposes.
"This investigation will continue and we expect it will widen in scope," a police spokesman said.
In another case, a man identified as Yu, who has yet to be apprehended, is suspected of paying South Korean donors about 3 million to 5 million won and selling their ova to Japanese woman for about 17 million won, police said.
There is no actual law prohibiting the sale of ova in Japan but the country's association of gynaecologists has a regulation against the trade that is strictly followed, according to the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun.
Japanese women have turned to donors from South Korea because of the similar racial features and the proximity of the two countries, the paper said. (With additional reporting by Lee Jin-joo in Seoul and Isabel Reynolds in Tokyo)
