This transcript has been automatically generated.


Episode 3: The Industry
Ava Kofman: Previously on The Journey. 
Cindy Galdamez: He was chasing her. Yeah, and that's the one time that we called the cops, because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun, and I mean, it was kind of like a standoff. The sheriffs came. 
Ray Hsu: Our clients are actually very feisty, so they–. He actually got into physical fights with those workers.
Zimo Li: It seems that Guojun was using money to control Silvia. 
Tina Powers: That company was very much going by the time we got there, but, like, hidden in the house. Very much hidden in the house. 
Ava Kofman: What are the thoughts going through your head in terms of what's gonna happen to, to baby girl? 
Stacy King: This is a lot. It was a whole lot. I, I want her to be safe. I wanted her to be safe. 
Kayla Elliott: These were pictures, like, of Silvia in the same exact outfit, the same leather jacket, like the same outfit to the T. I mean, they're, you just can't say like, "Oh no, that's not me." Like, it is you. You know what I mean? 
Crystal Calderon: She's like, "Look at this." She's all, "Can you imagine?" I go, I go, "What do you mean can I imagine? That's the lady we had the baby for."
Olympia Belmonte: When I die, like that's what I wanna be remembered as. Like, oh, you know, Olympia had a kid for somebody. She changed this couple's life. That's just always been my thing. 
Ava Kofman: Olympia Belmonte had wanted to change someone's life for a long time. But it wasn't until she was in her 30s with three kids of her own that she was able to act on this desire.
Olympia Belmonte: I was like, "I'm not getting any younger," and I was like, "Let's just do it." I was ready. Mm-hmm. 
Ava Kofman: I met up with Olympia in a park by her house. As her kids played nearby, she told me how she found a surrogacy agency just outside LA County, and signed up to be a gestational carrier. The agency required her to share a lot of personal information: photos, employment history, medical records from previous pregnancies. But she wasn't told much about who she'd be carrying for. She wasn't even sent a profile. All she knew was that the intended mother was also in her 30s and didn't have any kids. As the date of the embryo transfer approached, Olympia got a last-minute call from the agency. The IP was wondering if she was willing to carry twins.
Olympia Belmonte: And I was like, "Huh. I don't, I don't know." Like, first of all, if she wanted twins she should have said that from the beginning. That's how I feel. Like, don't ask me literally on a Friday afternoon, um, when you know that my transfer is Monday. 
Ava Kofman: This was a big ask. Twin pregnancies are considered riskier. 
Olympia Belmonte: It was kinda like being cornered. If I corner her here, she's gonna say yes. The chances of me saying yes are a lot higher than me saying no. 
Ava Kofman: Olympia wanted so badly to make the intended mom happy. 
Olympia Belmonte: And then I started thinking, "Man, like, poor thing. She probably doesn't have kids, and she wants two already. She's probably trying to secure two kids because she doesn't wanna have an only child." All these things went through my mind, and I was like, "All right. I'll do it." Like, I wanted to help somebody. I wanted to make a difference in someone's life. This is even a bigger difference, like, I didn't just give you one, I gave you two. 
Ava Kofman: The transfer was a success. But as the twins kept growing, Olympia rarely heard from the intended mom.
Olympia Belmonte: My family would ask me, "Hey, mija, so do you talk to her? Does she check in with you?" And I was like, "Uh, occasionally. Like, you know, it's here and there." 
Ava Kofman: At just 31 weeks, Olympia went into labor. She messaged the mother frantically. 
Olympia Belmonte: I said, "We're waiting for you, Silvia." 
Ava Kofman: Silvia, as in Silvia Zhang. That was the supposedly childless woman who'd hired Olympia to carry twins.
Olympia Belmonte: I don't know. I was so stupid. I was like, "She probably wants to see them come out," you know, thinking like, like a mother. I was like, "She wants to be there." So I told my husband, "You can't go in with me.” I, I wanted her to be a part of it.
Ava Kofman: Silvia had come to the hospital earlier that day, but when doctors suggested the birth wasn't imminent, she left. She returned in time for the C-section, clad in her leather jacket. Olympia felt some rustling around as doctors pulled out a tiny boy and a tiny girl. 
Olympia Belmonte: I remember, you know, they have, like, this huge sheet in front of you, and I remember hearing the babies crying. 
Ava Kofman: Two discordant wails. Silvia stood by Olympia's bedside, stroking her hair and whispering into her ear.
Olympia Belmonte: She kept telling me that she was super grateful. "Thank you so much. Um, I'm forever grateful." And she kept kissing me on my forehead, and I was just, I was crying. I know for a fact that tears were just coming out of my eyes. I thought it was, like, a really beautiful thing. 
Ava Kofman: The twins were two months premature, so they were rushed to the NICU. Olympia tried to look at their faces. She knew she wouldn't get to see the babies again, so she asked a nurse if she could say goodbye.
Olympia Belmonte: “Not that I wanna hold them. It's just kinda like a closure thing." And one nurse said, "I will take you." And she was like, "But with the conditions of, like, no phones. You're not holding them, and it's, like, a quick thing because I can get in trouble." And I was like, "Okay." And she took me in there. I just got to see them in their, um, little incubator. 
Ava Kofman: The boy was wrapped in a blue blanket, the girl in a pink one. 
Olympia Belmonte: I was like, oh, man, these two are gonna be so loved because they didn't come easy, you know? I was just like, for sure these two, they're gonna be somebody one day, and I brought them into this world, and that's, like, the best feeling ever.
Ava Kofman: After Olympia was discharged from the hospital, she figured she'd hear from Silvia soon. But that evening, when her phone rang, it was the nurses. 
Olympia Belmonte: They call me, and they're like, "Hey, so this is our first time dealing with a surrogacy. How does it work? 'Cause Mom's already gone."
Ava Kofman: After the birth, Silvia had left, and even though she lived 40 minutes from the hospital, she hadn't come back. This was unusual. A baby in the NICU is in a fragile state, so most of the time the child's guardians will stay close by in case anything happens, and for all the decisions that need to be made about the child's care.
Olympia Belmonte: They needed to know, can we do this? Can we do that? Can we give them formula? Do you have breast milk that you're providing? All of that. They can't just go and give your baby formula without your permission. 
Ava Kofman: Silvia wasn't even answering her phone. The nurses didn't know what to do. 
Olympia Belmonte: They kept calling me to see who was gonna go, like, who was responsible for the babies?
Ava Kofman: Who was responsible for the babies? From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Ava Kofman, and this is The Journey. Episode 3: The Industry
Ava Kofman: Some parts of Olympia's story about caring for Silvia were similar to other stories I'd heard. But one of the major differences was that Olympia hadn't gone through The couple's own agency. She wasn't a Mark surrogate. In fact, years before the couple opened Mark Surrogacy, they began accumulating children using another agency, a professional, well-established one. That agency was called BabyTree. 
Babytree promotional video: Here at BabyTree, we have an experienced staff comprised of women and men who have first-hand knowledge and experience with all the steps and procedures for a successful journey. 
Ava Kofman: BabyTree is one of hundreds of surrogacy agencies in the US, and it is, in many ways, typical. It's located in Southern California, one of the world capitals of the fertility industry. Its surrogates seem to be paid around the industry average, between $50,000 and $70,000, while intended parents might expect to pay BabyTree three times as much. A lot of its intended parents are from China. This is typical, too. Surrogacy is banned in China. A recent study of US surrogacies found that between 2014 and 2020, more than 40% of all intended parents from overseas were from China. Recently, American surrogacy agencies have reported an uptick in uber wealthy Chinese clients seeking multiple children. It's not clear how Silvia and Guojun first heard about BabyTree, but between them, they ended up hiring at least four surrogates through the agency, and attempted to hire even more. And all this seems to have been Guojun's idea. He approached the agency first in 2018, back when he was still living in Rowland Heights, and possibly before he became involved with Silvia. In fact, the profile he submitted to BabyTree, which stated that he was childless, featured a photo of him smiling next to his then wife, Yuqin Li. BabyTree matched Guojun with a woman who, as far as I can tell, was Guojun's very first surrogate. 
Amber Applegarth: You, my friend, need to chill. 
Ava Kofman: That's Amber Applegarth. I visited her one afternoon at her home north of LA County. Her toddler sat on her lap. Amber had been a surrogate once before and was still in touch with that family. But this journey was disappointing. After an introductory Zoom, Guojun became distant, hard to reach. 
Amber Applegarth: I was under the impression that he lived in China and was never out here. Like, I never knew that man was living in the States at all. 
Ava Kofman: In the summer of 2019, Amber gave birth to a son for Guojun, but neither he nor his wife showed up at the hospital. Instead, a woman who identified herself as Guojun's assistant collected the baby. 
Amber Applegarth: She showed up the next day, and they brought the baby in to see me for a little bit. She mentioned to me, "Oh, they want you to name the baby, uh, his American name." So I'm like, "This is weird. Why would you want me to name your baby?"
Ava Kofman: Later, when Amber saw the mugshots online, she realized that the woman who'd been describing herself as Guojun's assistant was Silvia. Silvia, meanwhile, had set up her own profile at BabyTree, separate from Guojun's. She described herself as a single woman without any kids, hoping to start a family. She said she was using donors for the egg and the sperm, but I've since learned the donor sperm was Guojun's. It was through Silvia's profile that the couple hired their next surrogate, Crystal Calderon. It was her first journey, so she didn't find it odd that she never met Silvia, not even at the birth. She had a boy in January 2022. 
Crystal Calderon: So I was thinking, "Okay, you know, he's going off to a great life. You know, Silvia's a real estate developer. You know, she has her life overseas, and she comes here to LA for business as well." I was thinking, "Okay, he's gonna, he's good." 
Ava Kofman: The next surrogate Silvia hired through BabyTree agreed to meet on the condition that I didn't use her name or record her. Eight months after Crystal, she had a son for Silvia. Again, Silvia didn't show up to the hospital until after the birth. And then there was Olympia, the surrogate who delivered the premature twins in October 2022, the twins that Silvia had rarely visited in the hospital. 
Olympia Belmonte: And I kept thinking like, "Okay, you've, you're paying all this money from, for you to have these kids. Where are you?" 
Ava Kofman: These BabyTree surrogates had given birth years before the Mark surrogates I'd talked to. By the time I tracked down Amber, Crystal, and Olympia, the kids they'd carried were three, four, even six years old. They were now in foster care, along with their siblings. But before that, they'd been living for years in the Arcadia Mansion, where the surveillance footage had shown toddlers being spanked, hit in the face, forced to hold squats. Olympia couldn't help but blame herself. 
Olympia Belmonte: I do feel bad. I do feel bad because I'm like, these kids, they didn't, they didn't ask. They, you know, they're so innocent to all of this, and were they being abused? That's something that I, I would have to live with for the rest of my life. How do you, how do you carry that? You know, here I am thinking like, oh my God, yes. Now whether I like it or not, yes, I changed somebody's life, but it wasn't all for good, you know? And that's gonna follow me forever. 
Ava Kofman: But Olympia and other surrogates also started to wonder who exactly was at fault. It's not like they would have agreed to this match had they known more about the couple. Silvia and Guojun had misled them about their marital status and how many children they already had. And what about BabyTree? What was the agency's responsibility here? 
Olympia Belmonte: My husband, um, he did ask me numerous times. He was like, "Doesn't the agency, like, do a thorough investigation?" Because he felt that they were very intense with us. "Oh, go do this. Go get this done." Why are you investigating us so deeply? And he's like, "What did they do with them?" You know, and then he told me, he was like, "Is it because they have money?" 
Amber Applegarth: Did the agency know about it, and just allowed it, and they just were fraudulent, and just knew this was gonna be the case? Like, were they completely innocent in it? Am I, you know, are we all innocent in this? 
Crystal Calderon: You know, I, I, I mean, I trusted them. You know, I would think that they would've been more, I guess, tedious about who they were assisting with having children for. 
Olympia Belmonte: And again, everybody always goes back to the same thing. “Mija, how is it that the agency didn't know?” Everybody always asks me that
Ava Kofman: One evening this January, I drove with our producer Natalie out to the high desert, northeast of LA, to knock on the door of someone who knew a lot about BabyTree.
Ava Kofman: Hi, Rebekah? I'm Ava. 
Ava Kofman: Her name is Rebekah Hernandez. She had worked at the agency for years, and we'd heard something promising about her.
Rebekah Hernandez: I'm no longer with BabyTree. I'm no longer with BabyTree. 
Ava Kofman: Recently, she'd quit. Rebekah stood at her door wearing a wrap sweater and leopard print lounge pants. She has straight, dark hair, a little emerald nose ring, long nails sharpened like switchblades, and decorated with rhinestones. As we started to chat, it seemed like she'd been waiting for someone to ask her about BabyTree for a long time.
Rebekah Hernandez: I was with BabyTree for seven years, and from what I know, I felt like something was off at some point. 
Ava Kofman: When she started at BabyTree in 2018, she had no experience in the fertility industry. Her previous job was at Red Lobster. But she discovered she loved helping women navigate their journeys. Rebekah said BabyTree had a reputation for spoiling its surrogates. It was part of her job to mail the women gift baskets tailored to each trimester, treat them to a day spa, talk through their hormonal swings, and host a monthly support group. 
Rebekah Hernandez: And, you know, we're talking about vaginal suppositories and periods and, you know, something that kids and partners don't really wanna hear. And you want, we want our surrogates to be able to feel like they can talk about that stuff. 
Ava Kofman: In spite of these niceties, Rebekah told us that BabyTree's founder and CEO, Patrick Yu, seemed to be trying to push through as many matches as possible. Sometimes she noticed Patrick would withhold or obscure details that would've otherwise disqualified a match. Or when surrogates failed health or psych screenings, he'd find doctors who'd pass them. And Patrick kept finding matches for one wealthy parent who made Rebekah especially uneasy. 
Rebekah Hernandez: Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp because I didn't feel good about ladies being with her. 
Ava Kofman: The surrogate pimp was, of course, Silvia.
Rebekah Hernandez: I felt like there was something off just because when he first told me that she wanted to have a lot of, um, a lot of surrogates at one time, and at that time she was just a single mother. 
Ava Kofman: And then at some point, even though Silvia was representing herself as single, it became clear there was someone else hovering behind the scenes.
Rebekah Hernandez: So then all of a sudden she had a partner, and it was a male, but a, an older male. And I thought that was kind of weird, but I figured, kind of what was explained to me as kind of like a business partner possibly type thing. Thought maybe she was doing that to help, um, ladies feel more comfortable to move forward with her.
Ava Kofman: Silvia told the agency she was using donated eggs and sperm, though Rebekah didn't realize at the time that the sperm was Guojun's. 
Rebekah Hernandez: That was part of my red flag to where it's like, "Hmm, you want a lot of babies that are not even yours genetically." 
Ava Kofman: Rebekah heard that Silvia wanted 12 kids. 
Ava Kofman: How did you know she wanted 12 kids, if that was more than, like how did that, how did that come up to you?
Rebekah Hernandez: Uh, my, uh, Patrick told me that.
Ava Kofman: Patrick was like, "This IP, she wants 12"? 
Natalie Jablonski: 12 was the number?
Rebekah Hernandez: I want to say it was 12 to 15, something like that. 
Ava Kofman: And was there, like, any other families that stuck in your mind with that high of an amount? 
Rebekah Hernandez: No. 
Ava Kofman: Rebekah and other employees raised concerns about Silvia's ambitious goal with Patrick, but he brushed those aside.
Rebekah Hernandez: He's like, "No, no." He's like, "In China, that is something that is, like, shows–. It's like a, a wealth status. Like, wow, you must be wealthy 'cause you have a lot of kids." I don't know. I just felt something was off. And I didn't have any, like, concrete proof, you know, until the twins. 
Ava Kofman: The twins. These were the babies that Olympia had carried, who'd ended up in the NICU needing round-the-clock care. It turned out Olympia wasn't the only person getting calls from the nurses. 
Rebekah Hernandez: The hospital kept calling us and was like, "Where is the intended parents? Where is the intended parents? Hey, have they reached out yet? They're still calling. They're still calling, still calling.” You know, the hospital's starting to worry. And the nurses were like, "Okay, what's going on? A week has gone by. They've still not come to, um, see the twins." But then when they finally did come, after a week had gone by, the nurses call us again, very concerned, like, "There's no connection there. There's no connection there. It doesn't seem like, you know, it doesn't seem normal. It doesn't seem they just kind of came just to come."
Natalie Jablonski: Like, the connection between the pa…
Rebekah Hernandez: The parents and the babies, the, the twins. Yeah. Like, this is not normal. It's not okay. Uh, they're concerned about it. 
Ava Kofman: Rebekah was also concerned. She talked to her boss, Patrick, about it. The parents did eventually pick up the twins. But after that, the so-called surrogate pimp and her mysterious older partner stopped using BabyTree. Rebekah assumed that was the last she'd ever hear of the couple. The surrogates I interviewed kept asking me, how had all this been allowed to happen? Wasn't it super illegal? But as I was reporting, I learned that neither BabyTree nor Mark Surrogacy had broken the rules because in the surrogacy industry, there aren't many. 
Kallie Fell: Nothing that this couple did in the surrogacy world, besides abuse allegations, is illegal.
Ava Kofman: That's Kallie Fell. She's a perinatal nurse and the executive director of a conservative nonprofit called the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. Kallie found out about the Mark Surrogacy situation in May of twenty twenty-five after seeing a video on, you guessed it. 
Kallie Fell: I think she had posted too on, like, TikTok or something.
Ava Kofman: This was the viral TikTok posted by Kayla Elliott, the surrogate in Corpus Christi. Kallie was the first person to amplify Kayla's story, and she was struck by how many loopholes the scandal exposed. 
Kallie Fell: Starting their own agency, not illegal. Having twenty-plus children via surrogacy, not illegal. Not disclosing to surrogate mothers that you have multiple women pregnant, not illegal. It's all legal in the state of California. I could start a surrogacy agency tomorrow if I wanted to. 
Ava Kofman: Kallie doesn't want to. In fact, she's a vocal opponent of surrogacy. For her, what the couple had done was just more proof that the entire industry was beyond repair. The organization she runs has called for a surrogacy ban. This is a controversial view. But Kallie's specific point about the lack of regulation isn't. People within the surrogacy industry told me the same thing. There are no federal laws governing the practice. Each state has its own laws, and some don't have any. Only one state, New York, even requires surrogacy agencies to be licensed. It was more onerous for Silvia to get a real estate license than it was for her to open Mark Surrogacy. And since the parents are the customer, asymmetry structures the deal. Kallie pointed out that surrogates are far more likely to be extensively vetted than intended parents. 
Kallie Fell: We don't even do home studies on these intended parents. I mean, my husband and I tried to rescue, um, an adult pug in the state of California, and the amount of home studies and visits people wanted to do for a dog, I mean, we don't have that in surrogacy at all. 
Natalie Jablonski: I do think that's very, I mean, I've also tried to adopt a puppy at one point in my life, and, you know, I was rejected.
Ava Kofman: That's our producer Natalie chiming in. She's now the proud mother of two cats. Anyway, some agencies and fertility attorneys do require intended parents to undergo background checks and screenings. But we looked through state laws and didn't find any that require IPs to disclose the number of children they have, or for that matter, the number of surrogates.
Kallie Fell: We would never build a welfare system, a child welfare system, the way that surrogacy is allowed to run. We would never build that. That doesn't exist in adoption, that doesn't exist anywhere else. 
Ava Kofman: To adopt, you typically work with a licensed agency and go through interviews and home studies. And even then, there's no guarantee of success. You might end up stuck on a waitlist for years. That's actually one of the reasons people are drawn to surrogacy. The process is much faster. In adoption, no substantial amount of money is supposed to change hands between the parents and the birth mother. This is because of the fear that if money were part of the equation, people might sell their own children or even start having children in order to sell them. But surrogacy almost always involves a financial exchange, so I thought it'd be even more regulated than adoption. Why isn't it? 
Naomi Cahn: I think this question is, is fascinating. 
Ava Kofman: That's Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the University of Virginia who's written extensively about custody and reproductive rights. Naomi told me that she's currently researching this exact topic, the history of surrogacy laws and why they've evolved so differently from the ones that govern adoption.
Naomi Cahn: I don't think there's gonna be one answer. In adoption, the focus is on the best interests of the child. In surrogacy, the contracts that are entered into are for the intending parents, and the focus of the contract is producing a child for the intending parents. 
Ava Kofman: Adoption is oriented around protecting the best interests of a child who's already been conceived. Surrogacy, on the other hand, has been seen more like other kinds of fertility treatments. It's generally used by parents who aren't able to otherwise conceive, and so it's focused on the interests of those parents. Surrogacy has grown in popularity as IVF technology has become more widespread. There are now thousands of surrogacies in the US each year. But unlike adoption, the practice is fairly new as an industry, so a lot of these arrangements still happen informally. Whenever Natalie or I asked industry experts about the lack of oversight, they told us that in a journey done right, oversight is supposed to be built in along the way. There's the surrogacy agency, the fertility clinic, the lawyers who handle the contracts. And at each of these stages, anyone has the opportunity to say, "Hold on a second. Something seems off here." We asked whether there were any rules to make sure things actually work this way, and people kept steering us to SEEDS.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if you're familiar with the organization SEEDS.
Molly O'Brien: Yes, SEEDS is kind of a new organization.
Speaker 1: Your very first step should be work with SEEDS-affiliated professionals because we agree to all of these standards. 
Ava Kofman: SEEDS stands for the Society for Ethics in Egg Donation and Surrogacy. It's a private group, but the closest thing that surrogacy agencies have to any sort of regulatory body. SEEDS members pay yearly fees and agree to follow a set of standards. They're pretty detailed. The ones for surrogacy agencies are more than 20 pages, and include things like requiring background checks for intended parents and limiting simultaneous surrogacies. 
Adrienne Black: Hi. 
Natalie Jablonski: Hi, how are you? 
Adrienne Black: I'm good. How about yourself?
Natalie Jablonski: I'm good. Thanks for taking the time. 
Ava Kofman: Natalie talked to the group's president, Adrienne Black. She's a four-time surrogate and also runs her own agency in Oregon. 
Adrienne Black: Because we do not have a lot of legislation in place related to surrogacy, the guidance has not always been as clear as we've seen in other industries and fields. And so that does mean that we are feeling it out as we go. 
Ava Kofman: There's one problem, though, with an approach that relies on feeling it out as you go. 
Natalie Jablonski: So if, like, somebody violates a standard, how do you, like, what are the sort of consequences of that? 
Adrienne Black: Ah. So this is also a piece where SEEDS is really growing up because, again, that was not really what our intention was as an organization originally, and it is where we are heading. And so we are still in that process of really identifying what are the consequences because, frankly, we didn't have a lot of scenarios until the last few years where we had to address consequences. 
Ava Kofman: For now, those consequences... 
Adrienne Black: Ultimately, the teeth that we have are to remove, it's to remove membership. 
Natalie Jablonski: So if the sort of worst-case scenario happens, someone complains about an agency, and they get kicked out of SEEDS, it's still, like, not the same as, like, shutting the agency down or, or removing its license or something like that. And I guess, like, do you, do you ever, like, wish that you had that power or wish that someone had that power? Um, is there, like, a need for that kind of oversight?
Adrienne Black: Are you asking me as an agency owner or me as the SEEDS president? 
Natalie Jablonski: Well, I guess I would be interested in, in your answer for, in both capacities. 
Adrienne Black: SEEDS president hat. I think one of the challenges that we look at on an ongoing basis is just that we don't have the power to do more. We aren't here to regulate an entire industry. We are here to provide ethical expectations and to help professionals meet those ethical expectations. People who choose not to be part of that, they choose not to be part of it.
Ava Kofman: Fair enough. It's worth noting that neither Mark Surrogacy nor BabyTree are SEEDS members. As for Adrienne's other hat, as the owner of a surrogacy agency, she worries that regulation could be costly and burdensome.
Adrienne Black: Would it be good for the people we serve? Potentially. Would it put all of us out of business? Possibly. 
Ava Kofman: Lots of industries make these kinds of arguments when faced with the prospect of more rules. But Adrienne says it's more than just a matter of protecting the bottom line. Poorly designed regulation could make the work a lot harder.
Adrienne Black: We're here because we love families. We want families to grow. And so if there's a better way to do it, I think a lot of us would be on board, if not most of us. But that's not the case, and that's not what we see in most legislation, and that's not what we see when people come in and wanna regulate or license.
Ava Kofman: I encountered this a lot, the skepticism that people working outside the fertility industry could be trusted to get the policies right. Take the idea of background screenings for intended parents, which might seem at first glance like a simple thing to implement. 
Deborah Wald: People, you know, uh, fertile heterosexual couples, um, or singles get pregnant all the time.
Ava Kofman: That's Deborah Wald. She's a prominent family attorney based in San Francisco. 
Deborah Wald: You know, people can have sex in the back of a car and end up with a child with no kind of checks of anything. 
Ava Kofman: Deborah was one of several lawyers who pointed out to me that making evaluations and screenings mandatory might start to create double standards around who gets to be a parent.
Deborah Wald: I mean, should every gay male couple who wants to be parents have to undergo criminal justice and mental health, you know, psychological evaluations before they're allowed to have children when the majority, vast majority of heterosexual couples don't have to do any of that? 
Ava Kofman: All kinds of people use surrogates, but the industry is well-known as a lifeline for gay couples in particular.
Deborah Wald: It's a sensitive balance between trying to make sure that this industry is being handled in a responsible way, um, and also not just blatantly discriminating against people who either due to fertility issues or because within their intimate relationships they don't have the right combination of gametes need reproductive assistance to become parents. So it's not simple. From my perspective, it's actually not simple. 
Ava Kofman: Wald says she fears that a situation like Mark Surrogacy might trigger the wrong kind of political reaction. 
Deborah Wald: I worry about knee-jerk responses, um, that take this as a common problem and solve it in ways that hurt a lot of families. Bad facts make for bad law. 
Ava Kofman: Natalie and I actually talked to a lot of fertility professionals who shared these anxieties about giving the federal government more power to weigh in on family-making. This is Molly O'Brien, a fertility attorney and the former president of SEEDS. 
Molly O'Brien: The United States is the safest, currently the safest place to do this legally and ethically. I'm really afraid that people who have no other way to have a family, this will be taken away from them. 
Ava Kofman: This is why Molly and many of her peers were hesitant to even talk with us about Mark's surrogacy. They told us they worried that drawing any attention to unflattering stories about the industry could be weaponized by surrogacy opponents, and even lead to calls for an outright ban.
Molly O'Brien: Worst case scenario is this becomes illegal. You can't do it. And that would be devastating to a huge number of people. 
Ava Kofman: It's true that as a lot of people in the industry emphasized, most of these matches are happy matches that result in happy families. Intended parents overjoyed at being gifted the miracle of a baby. And surrogates whose lives were profoundly changed by the experience, too. Many industry professionals insisted that the Mark Surrogacy scandal is not a sign of systemic problems. It's an exception. Here's Adrienne Black, the SEEDS president. 
Adrienne Black: Those are bad people who exploited a system to get what they wanted. They lied. They were liar pants on fire, right? 
Ava Kofman: And yet, as the multi-billion dollar fertility industry has grown over the years, so too has the number of scandals, exploiting surrogates or parents or children. 
Television news anchor: A St. Augustine surrogate mother is fighting for full custody of the children she gave birth to after she says the intended parent never picked them up…
Television news reporter: A surrogate who refused to abort her baby despite requests from the biological parents gave birth yesterday. 
Speaker 3: He made a plan to have as many as 50 children through a web of egg donors and surrogates. 
Television news anchor: Now a woman convicted of running a Ponzi scheme in her surrogacy business has learned her fate in a case that we've been following for years.
Speaker 4: This wasn't just money that was stolen. It was, you know, it was the hope. It was the dream of building a family. 
Ava Kofman: It felt like every other week while I was reporting, I'd come across yet another example of wrongdoing. To me, it seemed the stakes of surrogacy were too high, and there were too many parties involved to rely on everyone's good faith. Whether or not surrogacy should be regulated as strictly as adoption is a larger debate, but the status quo doesn't seem to be working either. And as things currently stand, there is no system in place to stop Guojun and Silvia from recruiting even more surrogates and having even more children, which I found out, is exactly what they've been doing.
Ava Kofman: After the situation with the twins back in 2022, Rebekah Hernandez, the BabyTree coordinator, stopped hearing much about Silvia and Guojun.
Rebekah Hernandez: And they kind of, yeah, disappeared for a while, and I thought we were done with them. 
Natalie Jablonski: And did you know why, or did he say why? 
Ava Kofman: He being her boss, BabyTree's founder, Patrick Yu.
Rebekah Hernandez: I thought that we were just not dealing with them because he, he finally saw what I was feeling. And then they came back. 
Ava Kofman: They came back. Silvia and her older male partner returned to BabyTree. Rebekah couldn't quite remember when it was, either 2024 or early 2025, but it was definitely after they'd opened Mark Surrogacy and before their arrest. And BabyTree found Silvia and Guojun yet another surrogate. Her name was Elizabeth, and she soon became pregnant. Rebekah and I did the math. At the time we were talking, Elizabeth must have been in her third trimester. 
Ava Kofman: Like, just the fact that there's a baby right now about to be born for them is just kinda, kind of wild to me.
Rebekah Hernandez: What's gonna happen. 
Ava Kofman: Yeah. 
Rebekah Hernandez: Yeah. And I, I don't know. I don't know. Is she, what is she thinking? I can only imagine what her thoughts could be now that she's about to deliver, and does she know? I mean, none of us know what's gonna happen with the baby right now. I mean, are they gonna take the baby to foster care? Like, I'd be freaking out. 
Ava Kofman: I guess I, like, couldn't understand why. It's like I can't understand. It's like you're a real agency. You have all these clients. Why would you work with these parents again…
Rebekah Hernandez: Right.
Ava Kofman: when it turned out so badly?
Rebekah Hernandez: Same question. My same question. I was very disappointed that when I found out we were still working with them, when I saw her name again. I was like, "But why?"
Ava Kofman: I needed to put this question to Patrick Yu, the founder and CEO of BabyTree. There was just one problem.
Automated voice: At the tone, please record your message. When you've finished recording... 
Ava Kofman: Hi, Mr. Yu. My name is Ava Kofman. I'm a journalist with The New Yorker.
Ava Kofman: Patrick wasn't responding to my voicemails, emails, and texts. But just as we were wrapping up our reporting, he returned a call from our fact checker, Yinuo Shi. They spoke in Mandarin for almost two hours, and the next evening she patched me in for a follow-up conversation. 
Yinuo Shi: [speaking in Mandarin] Hi, Ava. I just told Patrick that I patched you in. 
Ava Kofman: Oh, hey. Hi, Patrick. So nice to meet you. Thanks for making the time.
Patrick Yu: Yeah, nice to meet you. 
Ava Kofman: I asked Patrick why. Why had the couple come back? And why, after what had happened with the twins, had his agency agreed to work with them again? Patrick told us the story from the beginning, switching between English and Mandarin.
Patrick Yu: Uh, yeah, I think at the very beginning, they told me they want 20. 
Ava Kofman: 20. He said Guojun had originally come to him with the goal of creating 20 children. Patrick told us he understood the appeal of a big family. He was the father of six kids himself. But he said the idea of having that many children kind of gave him a headache.
Patrick Yu: [speaking in Mandarin] 
Ava Kofman: He said he didn't fully understand Guojun's motivations, but the project seemed to be about establishing some sort of legacy, dynasty, bloodline. He told us Guojun had selected white Jewish women as his egg donors, and he wanted them to be highly educated, including at Harvard. Patrick confirmed that after the birth of Olympia's twins in 2022, he stopped working with the couple. But it wasn't because he ended the relationship. It was the couple who left him. 
Patrick Yu: Yeah. After that, they just lose connection with me. I think they just, they are done. They are finished. I think it's enough for them. Now, now when they come back again to say, "Okay, Patrick, I still want to more, more baby." 
Ava Kofman: When Silvia and Guojun returned and told Patrick they wanted more babies, he told me he tried to steer them to surrogates who might not seem desirable, like ones who were older or had had multiple C-sections. And he quoted the couple a higher price, hoping to dissuade them.
Patrick Yu: So I give her a very high price package. Yeah, I don't, I just don't want let her be just, "Oh, too expensive. Okay, I will not work with you." But she still agree that price. I'm surprised also. 
Ava Kofman: I asked Patrick if this was because he'd harbored concerns about working with the parents. He said, "No, no, that wasn't it at all. Guojun was just too much of a handful to deal with. He was rude, demanding, shouty." But when the parents agreed to his higher price, they'd all moved forward. I asked Patrick, "What about all the red flags that had been raised about these intended parents? In particular, what had happened with Olympia's twins in the NICU?" His answer surprised me. 
Patrick Yu: That's normal. Yeah. 
Ava Kofman: That's normal?
Patrick Yu: For other parents, yeah, similar. Yeah. 
Ava Kofman: You've, you've gotten calls for other parents who've left their children in the NICU. 
Patrick Yu: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh, uh, for me, I, I'm not surprised for that. I mean, that's the expectation, you know. You think it happened, you should come every day, but in fact, no. Yeah, uh, not every day. 
Ava Kofman: At several points in our conversation, Patrick emphasized that he routinely had surrogates complain to him about intended parents who didn't visit their children in the hospital. He rattled off other common complaints too, about parents who didn't seem excited to pick the babies up, or who didn't communicate much throughout the pregnancy.
Patrick Yu: Not only Chinese parents. American, white couple. I work with white, Black. Yeah, the same. It's the same. They only focus on how much I pay. How can I get a baby? They only care about the result. The result is the final. 
Ava Kofman: Many of his intended parents, he said, only cared about the destination, not the journey. So Silvia and Guojun's indifference hadn't really stuck out. He also wasn't too surprised when they came back. By the time the couple returned to BabyTree, around late 2024 or early 2025, he had heard they'd opened their own agency. But he figured they found it too hard to recruit their own surrogates. 
Patrick Yu: Too hard to find surrogate mother. So that's the reason I didn't ask any question about how many kids you have.
Ava Kofman: And so Patrick said he didn't realize how many more kids they'd had in the course of just a few years. He elaborated in Mandarin. 
Patrick Yu: [speaking in Mandarin] 
Ava Kofman: He's saying, "My thought process was, as long as they could afford it, and a lawyer was overseeing the process, I really didn't think too much about it." So he didn't, until the news broke in July about their arrest. And talking to Patrick, I discovered that BabyTree was involved in a much deeper way than I'd previously understood.
Patrick Yu: Uh, we have, at that time, we have total four. So we have another four. 
Ava Kofman: Another four. Since Silvia and Guojun had returned to BabyTree, Patrick had matched them with four new surrogates.
Ava Kofman: Patrick, you mentioned the four surrogates. Did those other surrogates all know that they were carrying for the same couple?
Patrick Yu: Uh, no, they don't know that. 
Ava Kofman: So they just thought they were the, they were giving Silvia her, like, first kid at that point. 
Patrick Yu: Uh, yes, yes. 
Ava Kofman: I asked if he had any qualms about these misrepresentations. 
Patrick Yu: I, I understand your, yeah, I understand your question. I know, I, I, I know what you want to know, but, you know, for agencies, hard. Yeah. Most agency, they just don't ask, uh, uh, the parents too much question. They just take the application as–. Yeah, that's the, the reason it happens. 
Ava Kofman: Yinuo stepped in to translate.
Yinuo Shi: Okay, so Patrick basically explained that we chose not to kind of ask too many questions, or we didn't really even want to figure out the complicated relationship between Guojun and Silvia. 
Ava Kofman: I also asked about what I'd heard from former BabyTree employees, that his agency cut corners to make matches. Patrick said his agency never altered medical records, but it did seek out more lenient clinics and doctors. "Different clinics have different standards," he said. As far as what had happened with Silvia and Guojun, Patrick stressed that as soon as he heard the news about the arrest, he ended three of the four matches immediately before any embryos had been transferred. And even though it meant losing money, he gave Silvia and Guojun a refund. For the fourth surrogate, though, Patrick said it was already too late. 
Patrick Yu: But for Elizabeth, we have nothing to do, yeah, because she's pregnant. 
Ava Kofman: This was Elizabeth, the pregnant BabyTree surrogate that Rebekah and I had discussed. 
Patrick Yu: For Elizabeth, unfortunately, at that time she just transferred, and blood work confirmed pregnancy. So I have no way to terminate. Then I just wait for, I wish Elizabeth can miscarry by herself. But the baby grew very well, and then after heartbeat confirmed, so we think the baby's stable. Then at that time, I will talk with, uh, Elizabeth, explain the situation. 
Ava Kofman: He'd been hoping Elizabeth would miscarry, he said, but she didn't, and so he'd arranged a meeting between Elizabeth and the intended parents. He said it went well. Silvia showed Elizabeth pictures of her kids on her phone and said that everything that was happening was based on a misunderstanding. Patrick went on to say he really didn't have any other option but to trust what the parents told him. He kept telling me, "This is just how the industry is."
Patrick Yu: Okay. Yeah, let me explain. Yeah. By understanding my experience, no any agency will, uh, reject to work with them. 
Ava Kofman: Why is that? 
Patrick Yu: It's about profit, yeah. 
Ava Kofman: It's about profit. 
Patrick Yu: Yeah. Yeah. And, um, because, you know, we can say it's legal, allowed. We didn't do nothing wrong. 
Ava Kofman: It's about profit. It's legal. It's allowed. Patrick said he'd done what any other agency would have.
Ava Kofman: One day last December, I drove north through the San Gabriel Mountains out to the desert. In LA, it'd been a warm, jacket-free day, but out here the air had cooled, like it was already the middle of winter. The streets were decorated with Christmas lights and inflatable reindeer. I was looking for Elizabeth, the BabyTree surrogate who was still carrying one of the couple's children. But I wasn't sure if I had the right address. I knocked on the door of a gray ranch house in a quiet residential neighborhood. I had a feeling I'd come to the right place when a woman opened the door, visibly pregnant beneath a fuzzy pink bathrobe. We spoke through a white grate, which she was using to keep her dog indoors. Beside me, on her porch, was a cardboard box with a blanket inside. She'd set it up as a little shelter, she explained, for the neighborhood strays. Yes, Elizabeth said. It was her first journey. She was in her third trimester, due in the new year. No, she said, she didn't keep up with the news. In fact, she hadn't heard much about her intended parents until just a few months ago. That was when Patrick had arranged that meeting between her and Guojun and Silvia. Elizabeth said that everyone had done a really good job of explaining things. She'd been reassured that it was all a big misunderstanding, and that she'd still get paid. By now, I talked to 12 women who'd carried for these IPs, and I was struck by how at ease Elizabeth seemed about the whole situation. As we kept chatting, I started to wonder if maybe in that meeting, she hadn't been told the full extent of what was going on. I asked if she was aware that the couple had other children who'd been taken into foster care. No, she didn't remember hearing that. Yes, she assumed the baby boy she was carrying would go to the parents. No, she didn't have any questions for me. I wasn't sure how much more to reveal. I didn't want to cause any stress to her or to the baby. So I apologized for showing up out of the blue and said goodbye. Later, I would learn that Elizabeth had given birth to a baby boy, that Silvia hadn't been allowed to pick him up at the hospital, and that the baby had immediately been placed into foster care.
Ava Kofman: Coming up on The Journey.
Stacy King: We had a diaper bag. I had onesies. I had already gotten a breast pump. We had baby stuff at home ready to go. I had busted out one of the smaller car seats for an infant and put that in the car. Like, we were prepared. 
Kemper Beasley III: This is a contract action, completely civil, just like, "Did I pay you for your apples?" I mean, this is the only scenario I can think of, quite frankly, where we were asked to intervene in a contract action. 
Brooke Teefey: People see this as a surrogacy case, but they're, they're real children, very real children that are involved. 
Ava Kofman: That's her. That's Silvia. Did you see? She's in the car right there. That's her in the white Tesla.
Kayla Elliott: No way. Oh my God, it is her.
Ava Kofman: The Journey is written and produced by me, Ava Kofman, senior producer Natalie Jablonski, and producer Rehman Tungekar. Samara Freemark is the managing producer for the series. It's edited by Alison MacAdam. Additional editing by Willing Davidson and Madeleine Baran. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Alison Leyton-Brown. This episode was mixed by Corey Schreppel. Our art is by Vartika Sharma. Art direction by Aviva Michaelov and Ben Kothe. Fact checking, additional reporting, and translation by Yinuo Shi. Our summer research assistant is Ethan Kan. Legal review by Fabio Bertoni and Ben Murray. Our managing editor is Julia Rothchild, with additional support from Khiara Ortiz. Thanks also to Parker Yesko. The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick. If you have comments or story tips, please send them to the team at inthedark@newyorker.com, and make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts.