Cindy Bi is not supposed to be telling me this story.
First, there’s the confidentiality clause. When Bi, a venture capitalist who claims to have invested in a dozen unicorns, hired a surrogate to carry her only male embryo in 2023, both parties agreed to keep the details private and away from the media. Then there’s the restraining order against Bi, followed by a court-ordered agreement saying she would not so much as mention the “surrogate” involved in Baby Leon’s stillbirth. Finally, there are social norms to consider when publicly attacking the woman who says she almost died carrying your child.
Still, Bi is talking to me. She sends me a nearly 3,000-item folder filled with legal filings; reports to professional organizations, insurance companies, employers, and the police; emails with her attorneys; and correspondence between her and the “Egg Whisperer” influencer, Dr. Aimee.
Bi considers herself a whistleblower out to protect “unborn children via surrogacy.” Her website invokes scripture: “Establish justice in the courts. Amos 5:15.” Indeed, Bi has racked up nearly a million dollars in legal bills since 2024, in what she views as a fight to honor her son. “I want the surrogate to be known for what she did, to be set as an example,” Bi tells me. “I hope she goes to jail.” Ideally, for murder.
American surrogacy is an enormous industry, taking in approximately $5 billion in 2024, and the practice is expected to explode globally almost tenfold in the next decade. It seems especially popular in Silicon Valley, where a growing cadre of investors and executives, from OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Dropbox’s Drew Houston, have used it to grow their families. More than a dozen big tech companies provide five-figure subsidies to any employee who needs or wants to outsource gestational labor. A shocking number of techies now believe growing a baby can be a straightforward business transaction.
But intended parents and gestational carriers—IPs and GCs, as they’re somewhat dehumanizingly known—are often uninformed about the dearth of regulation and completely unprepared for what can go wrong. Only one state, New York, requires agencies to be licensed. Although America is the world leader in surrogacy, it’s also the developed nation with the highest maternal mortality rate and one of the highest stillbirth rates, a situation described by many as “a public health crisis.” Compared to natural conception, carrying a genetically unrelated fetus more than triples the risk of severe, potentially deadly conditions, a statistic surrogates are rarely given. IPs do not always have to disclose complete medical information, including histories of certain conditions that may harm their GCs. They don’t have to be honest about how many kids they have, why they are hiring a surrogate, or how many other surrogates they have simultaneously pregnant. Do you really know who is carrying your child—or whose child you are carrying?
Meanwhile, the US is torn over who controls a pregnant woman’s body. The increasing acceptance of “fetal personhood” means that, in many states, losing a pregnancy can be charged as a felony and potentially punished with life in prison. This is thorny enough when it’s a woman’s own baby. It’s exponentially more fraught when the carrier isn’t the parent.
Many of the issues Bi and her surrogate encountered on their “journey” are likely far more common than you’d ever imagine. But you haven’t heard about them. They won’t influence policy or case law, because they tend to unfold in private, shrouded by confidentiality clauses and handled in closed arbitration proceedings. A stark power differential means that intended parents often have the means to file lawsuits and wage yearslong campaigns, while surrogates who feel screwed are forced to rely on free legal help and GoFundMe.
The case of Bi and her surrogate shows how, in an environment with little regulation and extreme inequality, the miracle of life can mutate into a death sentence.
