Inside Asia’s multibillion-dollar baby-making industry, where little miracles don’t come cheap

Hope and grief have defined Jenjira’s 11-year quest to complete her family, as her unfulfilled longing for a motherhood denied drives her back, time and again, to Bangkok’s best fertility clinics.

Now aged 45, the aspiring mother is down to her last two frozen embryos and is rapidly running out of cash. After nine attempts, she fears time may have run out on her and her husband’s dream of having a child of their own.

“I’ve done both science and black magic but maybe it is just my destiny not to have kids,” Jenjira, who only gave one name to avoid stigma aimed at her family, told This Week in Asia.

“Deep down I still want to have a baby. But every time we learn that it has failed we’re so sad and depressed, the world crumbles and I feel I’m a failure.”

Pressure from her in-laws and a husband desperate for an heir has compounded the emotional toll, she says, with months of each year lost to punishing regimens of hormone injections, medications, weight gain – and the painstaking process of picking up the pieces after her hopes come crashing down when treatment cycles fail.

So far, she has spent some 5 million baht (US$136,000) on the procedures: a small fortune for her, but a drop in the ocean of the multibillion-dollar business that is baby-making.

But in the pay-to-play world of ART, where you live – or are willing to travel to – determines how much you have to spend.

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“Let’s say you put in everything you can throw in to maximise the pregnancy rate, it’s not going to be cheap,” said Dr Colin Lee, CEO of Malaysia-based Alpha IVF Group, which has just listed on the Malaysian stock exchange. “The entire IVF process is quite complicated.”

IVF clinics have been