TIRANA, Albania — As you drive from the Tirana International Airport toward the heart of the Albanian capital, car dealerships and shopping center-lined freeways give way to tidy rows of Communist-era housing blocks, their concrete walls splashed in Funfetti-hued dazzle camo — reminders of the country’s darker periods hiding beneath a cheerful riot of cheap paint. Continue south and on your right, freshly laid roads snake up into hills dotted with luxury homes behind high white walls and security gates. Nestled among them, a red-bricked fertility clinic welcomes patients with a small courtyard and a sign emblazoned with the logo for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This is an “FDA registered facility,” it declares. When a Dutch woman named Wendy made this journey to the SAGA Clinic in February, she waited beneath a 3-foot fetus sculpted into the slate-colored wall of the spacious new lobby, before being led downstairs to a private room. From the exam chair she watched a grainy ultrasound image of her uterus as a doctor threaded in a catheter and gently deposited an embryo. She’d undergone this phase of in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a few times before. But this time the embryo wasn’t just a collection of cells carrying DNA from her and her partner back in the Netherlands. It also contained bits of genetic material from a third person, an egg donor from Ukraine. Read the rest…
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