The Journey, Episode 3: The Industry

It takes a village to create such a large family. Ava uncovers how the stunning lack of regulation in the surrogacy industry enabled the couple’s plans. New Yorker subscribers get early, ad-free access to “The Journey.” In Apple Podcasts, tap the link at the top of the feed to subscribe or link an existing subscription. Or visit newyorker.com/dark to subscribe and listen in the New Yorker app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Madeleine Baran?

  Previously on The Journey. 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.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Our clients are actually very feisty, so they, he actually got into physical fights with those workers.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  It seems that Guojun was using money to control Sylvia.

• 0:24Speaker 03

  That company was very much going by the time we got there, but like hidden in the house, very much hidden in the house.

• 0:35Speaker 04

  What are the thoughts going through your head in terms of what's going to happen to baby girl?

• 0:40Speaker 05

  This is a lot. It was a whole lot. I wanted to be safe. I wanted her to be safe.

• 0:47Speaker 06

  These were pictures like of Sylvia in the same exact outfit, the same leather jacket, like the same outfit to the T. I mean, you just can't say like, oh, no, that's not me. Like it is you. You know what I mean?

• 0:59Speaker 07

  She's like, look at this. She's all, can you imagine? I go, I go, I, what do you mean? Can I imagine? That's the lady we had the baby for.

• 1:17Speaker 04

  When I die, like that's what I want to be remembered as. Like, oh, you know, Olympia had a kid for somebody. She changed this couple's life.

• 1:26Speaker 04

  That's just always been my thing.

• 1:30Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 1:41Speaker 04

  I was like, I'm not getting any younger. And I was like, let's just do it. I was ready. Mm hmm.

• 1:47Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 2:30Speaker 04

  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.

• 2:48Madeleine Baran?

  This was a big ask. Twin pregnancies are considered riskier.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  It was kind of 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.

• 3:04Madeleine Baran?

  Olympia wanted so badly to make the intended mom happy.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  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 want to 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.

• 3:32Madeleine Baran?

  The transfer was a success. But as the twins kept growing, Olympia rarely heard from the intended mom.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  My family would ask me, hey Mia, 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.

• 3:49Madeleine Baran?

  At just 31 weeks, Olympia went into labor. She messaged the mother frantically.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  I said, we're waiting for you, Sylvia.

• 3:58Madeleine Baran?

  Sylvia, Aizen Sylvia Jong. That was the supposedly childless woman who'd hired Olympia to carry twins.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  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 wanted her to be a part of it.

• 4:19Madeleine Baran?

  Sylvia 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 wrestling around as doctors pulled out a tiny boy and a tiny girl.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  I remember, you know, they have like this huge sheet in front of you and I remember hearing the babies crying.

• 4:45Madeleine Baran?

  Two discordant wails. Sylvia stood by Olympia's bedside, stroking her hair and whispering into her ear.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:10Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  Not that I want to hold them. It's just kind of 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.

• 5:45Madeleine Baran?

  The boy was wrapped in a blue blanket, the girl in a pink one.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:08Madeleine Baran?

  After Olympia was discharged from the hospital, she figured she'd hear from Sylvia soon. But that evening, when her phone rang, it was the nurses.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  They called 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.

• 6:27Madeleine Baran?

  After the birth, Sylvia had left. And even though she lived 40 minutes from the hospital, she hadn't come back.

• 6:35Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  They needed to know, can we do this? Can we do that? Can we give them formula? Can, are you, 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.

• 7:01Madeleine Baran?

  Sylvia wasn't even answering her phone. The nurses didn't know what to do.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  They kept calling me to see who was gonna go, like who was responsible for the babies.

• 7:11Madeleine Baran?

  Who was responsible for the babies?

• 7:22Madeleine Baran?

  From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Eva Kaufman and this is The Journey.

• 7:28Madeleine Baran?

  Episode Three, The Industry.

• 7:36Madeleine Baran?

  Some parts of Olympia's story about caring for Sylvia were similar to other stories I'd heard.

• 7:43Madeleine Baran?

  But one of the major differences was that Olympia hadn't gone through the couple's own agency. She wasn't a marked surrogate. In fact, years before the couple opened Mark's Surrogacy, they began accumulating children using another agency, a professional, well-established one. That agency was called Baby Tree.

• 8:08Madeleine Baran?

  Here at Baby Tree, we have an experienced staff comprised of women and men who have firsthand knowledge and experience with all the steps and procedures for a successful journey. Baby Tree 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 Baby Tree 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,

• 8:53Madeleine Baran?

  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 Sylvia and Guojun first heard about Baby Tree. 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 Roland Heights and possibly before he became involved with Sylvia. In fact, the profile he submitted to Baby Tree, which stated that he was childless,

• 9:36Madeleine Baran?

  featured a photo of him smiling next to his then-wife, Yuchin Li. Baby Tree matched Guojun with a woman who, as far as I can tell, was Guojun's very first surrogate.

• 9:52Madeleine Baran?

  That's Amber Applegarth. I visited her one afternoon at her home north of LA County. Her toddler sat on her lap.

• 10:01Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 10:13Speaker 06

  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.

• 10:22Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 10:37Speaker 06

  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. And his American name. So I'm like, this is weird. Why would you want me to name your baby?

• 10:53Madeleine Baran?

  Later, when Amber saw the mugshots online, she realized that the woman who'd been describing herself as Guojun's assistant was Sylvia. Sylvia, meanwhile, had set up her own profile at Baby Tree, 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 Sylvia'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 Sylvia, not even at the birth. She had a boy in January 2022.

• 11:37Speaker 07

  So I was thinking, okay, you know, he's going off to a great life, you know, Sylvia's 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.

• 11:51Madeleine Baran?

  The next surrogate Sylvia hired through Baby Tree 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 Sylvia. Again, Sylvia didn't show up to the hospital until after the birth.

• 12:07Madeleine Baran?

  And then there was Olympia, the surrogate who delivered the premature twins in October 2022, the twins that Sylvia had rarely visited in the hospital.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  And I kept thinking like, okay, you, you're paying all this money for, for you to have these kids, where are you?

• 12:27Madeleine Baran?

  These Baby Tree 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.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  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

• 13:29Speaker 04

  it wasn't all for good, you know? And that's going to follow me forever.

• 13:35Madeleine Baran?

  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. Sylvia and Guojun had misled them about their marital status and how many children they already had.

• 13:53Madeleine Baran?

  And what about Baby Tree? What was the agency's responsibility here?

• 13:59Speaker 04

  My husband, 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?

• 14:19Speaker 06

  Did the agency know about it and just allowed it? And they just were fraudulent and just knew this was going to be the case? Like, were they completely innocent in it? Am I, you know, are we all innocent in this?

• 14:32Speaker 07

  You know, I, I mean, I trusted them, you know? I would think that they would have been more, I guess tedious about who they were assisting with having children for.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  And again, everybody always goes back to the same thing. Mihah, how is it that the agency didn't know?

• 14:53Speaker 04

  Everybody always asks me that.

• 15:05Madeleine Baran?

  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 Baby Tree.

• 15:16Speaker 06

  Hi.

• 15:17Madeleine Baran?

  Hi.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  Rebecca.

• 15:19Madeleine Baran?

  Yes. I'm Eva. Her name is Rebecca Hernandez. She had worked at the agency for years and we'd heard something promising about her.

• 15:27Speaker 06

  I'm no longer with Baby Tree.

• 15:29Madeleine Baran?

  I know.

• 15:30Speaker 06

  I'm no longer with Baby Tree.

• 15:32Madeleine Baran?

  Recently, she'd quit. Rebecca 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 Baby Tree for a long time.

• 15:53Speaker 06

  I was with Baby Tree for seven years and from what I know, I felt like something was off at some point.

• 16:01Madeleine Baran?

  When she started at Baby Tree 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. Rebecca said Baby Tree 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.

• 16:28Speaker 06

  And, you know, we're talking about vaginal suppositories and periods and, you know, something that kids and partners don't really want to hear. And you want, we want our surrogates to be able to feel like they can talk about that stuff.

• 16:40Madeleine Baran?

  In spite of these niceties, Rebecca told us that Baby Tree'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 have 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 Rebecca especially uneasy.

• 17:09Speaker 06

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp because I didn't feel good about ladies being with her.

• 17:17Madeleine Baran?

  The surrogate pimp was, of course, Sylvia.

• 17:20Speaker 06

  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.

• 17:33Madeleine Baran?

  And then, at some point, even though Sylvia was representing herself as single, it became clear there was someone else hovering behind the scenes.

• 17:43Speaker 06

  So then all of a sudden she had a partner and it was a male, but an older male. And I thought that was kind of weird, but I figured, I, kind of what was explained to me is kind of like a business partner possibly type thing. Thought maybe she was doing that to help ladies feel more comfortable to move forward with her.

• 18:02Madeleine Baran?

  Sylvia told the agency she was using donated eggs and sperm, though Rebecca didn't realize at the time that the sperm was Guojun's.

• 18:10Speaker 06

  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.

• 18:16Madeleine Baran?

  Rebecca heard that Sylvia wanted 12 kids. How did you know she wanted 12 kids if that was one? Like, how did that?

• 18:23Speaker 06

  My, my, Patrick told me.

• 18:25Madeleine Baran?

  Patrick was like, this IP, she wants 12?

• 18:28Speaker 06

  12 was the number? I want to say it was 12 to 15, something like that.

• 18:32Madeleine Baran?

  And there was like, any other families that stuck in your mind with that high of an amount?

• 18:37Speaker 06

  No.

• 18:39Madeleine Baran?

  Rebecca and other employees raised concerns about Sylvia's ambitious goal with Patrick, but he brushed those aside.

• 18:47Speaker 06

  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 because 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.

• 19:03Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 19:16Speaker 06

  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, they're calling, still calling. This, 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 see the twins. But then when they finally did come, after a week had gone by, the nurses called 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.

• 19:50Madeleine Baran?

  Like, the connection between the?

• 19:52Speaker 06

  The parents and the babies, the twins. Like, this is not normal, it's not okay. They're concerned about it.

• 19:59Madeleine Baran?

  Rebecca 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 Baby Tree.

• 20:17Madeleine Baran?

  Rebecca assumed that was the last she'd ever hear of the couple.

• 20:36Madeleine Baran?

  The surrogates I interviewed kept asking me, how would all this been allowed to happen? Wasn't it super illegal? But as I was reporting, I learned that neither Baby Tree nor Mark's surrogacy had broken the rules. Because in the surrogacy industry, there aren't many.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Nothing that this couple did in the surrogacy world besides abuse allegations is illegal.

• 21:02Madeleine Baran?

  That's Callie Fell. She's a perinatal nurse and the executive director of a conservative nonprofit called the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. Callie found out about the Mark's surrogacy situation in May of 2025. After seeing a video on, you guessed it.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  I think she had posted two on TikTok or something.

• 21:22Madeleine Baran?

  This was the viral TikTok posted by Kayla Elliott, the surrogate in Corpus Christi. Callie was the first person to amplify Kayla's story, and she was struck by how many loopholes the scandal exposed.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Starting their own agency, not illegal. Having 20-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.

• 21:55Madeleine Baran?

  Callie 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 Callie'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 Sylvia to get a real estate license than it was for her to open Mark's Surrogacy.

• 22:39Madeleine Baran?

  And since the parents are the customer, asymmetry structures the deal. Callie pointed out that surrogates are far more likely to be extensively vetted than intended parents.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  We don't even do home studies on these intended parents. I mean, my husband and I tried to rescue 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.

• 23:05Madeleine Baran?

  I do think that's very, I mean, I have also tried to adopt a puppy at one point in my life, and, you know, I was rejected. 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.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:46Madeleine Baran?

  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?

• 24:31Speaker 02

  I think this question is fascinating.

• 24:34Madeleine Baran?

  That's Naomi Khan, 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.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  I don't think there's going to 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.

• 25:13Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 25:58Madeleine Baran?

  There's a 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.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  I'm not sure if you're familiar with the organization SEEDS.

• 26:27Speaker 04

  You see, this is kind of a new organization.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Your very first step should be work with SEEDS-affiliated professionals because we agree to all of these standards.

• 26:37Madeleine Baran?

  SEEDS stands for the Society for Ethics in Ed. 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.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 27:07Speaker 06

  Hi, how are you?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  I'm good. How about yourself?

• 27:09Speaker 06

  I'm good. Thanks for taking the time.

• 27:12Madeleine Baran?

  Natalie talked to the group's president, Adrienne Black. She's a four-time surrogate and also runs her own agency in Oregon.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:37Madeleine Baran?

  There's one problem, though, with an approach that relies on feeling it out as you go.

• 27:42Speaker 06

  So if, like, somebody violates a standard, how do you, like, what are the sort of consequences of that?

• 27:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:15Madeleine Baran?

  For now, those consequences?

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Ultimately, the teeth that we have are to remove, it's to remove membership.

• 28:24Speaker 06

  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 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? Is there, like, a need for that kind of oversight?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Are you asking me as an agency owner or me as the SEEDS president?

• 28:56Speaker 06

  Well, I guess I would be interested in, in your answer for, in both capacities.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:37Madeleine Baran?

  Fair enough. It's worth noting that neither Mark's Surrogacy nor Baby Tree 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.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Would it be good for the people we serve? Potentially. Would it put all of us out of business? Possibly.

• 29:57Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  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 want to regulate or license.

• 30:32Madeleine Baran?

  I encounter 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. People, you know, fertile heterosexual couples or singles get pregnant all the time. That's Deborah Wald. She's a prominent family attorney based in San Francisco.

• 31:01Speaker 07

  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.

• 31:08Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 31:20Speaker 07

  I mean, should every gay male couple who wants to be parents have to undergo criminal justice and mental health?

• 31:28Speaker 07

  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.

• 31:38Madeleine Baran?

  All kinds of people use surrogates, but the industry is well-known as a lifeline for gay couples in particular.

• 31:45Speaker 07

  It's a sensitive balance between trying to

• 31:51Speaker 07

  make sure that this industry is being handled in a responsible way. 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.

• 32:16Speaker 07

  So it's not simple. From my perspective, it's actually not simple.

• 32:22Madeleine Baran?

  Wald says she fears that a situation like Mark's surrogacy might trigger the wrong kind of political reaction.

• 32:29Speaker 07

  I worry about knee-jerk responses

• 32:35Speaker 07

  that take this as a common problem and solve it in ways that hurt a lot of families. Bad facts make for bad law.

• 32:45Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 32:59Speaker 05

  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.

• 33:12Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  Worst-case scenario is this becomes illegal. You can't do it.

• 33:33Speaker 05

  And that would be devastating to a huge number of people.

• 33:38Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 33:58Madeleine Baran?

  Many industry professionals insisted that the Mark's surrogacy scandal is not a sign of systemic problems. It's an exception. Here's Adrian Black, the Seeds president.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Those are bad people who exploited a system to get what they wanted. They lied. They were liar pants on fire, right?

• 34:20Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  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. Surrogate who refused to abort her baby despite requests from the biological parents gave birth yesterday. He need a plan to have as many as 50 children through a web of egg donors and surrogates.

• 34:54Madeleine Baran?

  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. This wasn't just money that was stolen. It was, you know, it was the hope. It was the dream of building a family. 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.

• 35:35Madeleine Baran?

  And as things currently stand, there is no system in place to stop Guojun and Sylvia from recruiting even more surrogates and having even more children.

• 35:49Madeleine Baran?

  Which, I found out,

• 35:52Madeleine Baran?

  is exactly what they've been doing.

• 36:04Madeleine Baran?

  After the situation with the twins, back in 2022, Rebecca Hernandez, the Baby Tree coordinator, stopped hearing much about Sylvia and Guojun.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  And they kind of disappeared for a while and I thought we were done with them.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  And did you know why or did he say why?

• 36:20Madeleine Baran?

  He being her boss, Baby Tree's founder, Patrick Yu.

• 36:24Speaker 06

  I thought that we were just not dealing with them because he finally saw what I was feeling. And then they came back.

• 36:32Madeleine Baran?

  They came back. Sylvia and her older male partner returned to Baby Tree. Rebecca couldn't quite remember when it was, either 2024 or early 2025. But it was definitely after they'd opened Mark's surrogacy and before their arrest. And Baby Tree found Sylvia and Guojun yet another surrogate. Her name was Elizabeth and she soon became pregnant.

• 37:00Madeleine Baran?

  Rebecca and I did the math. At the time we were talking, Elizabeth must have been in her third trimester. Like, just the fact that there's a baby right now about to be born for them is just kind of wild to me. Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I don't know. I don't know. 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 going to happen with the baby right now. I mean, are they going to take the baby to foster care? I'd be freaking out.

• 37:30Madeleine Baran?

  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 when it turned out so badly?

• 37:40Speaker 06

  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?

• 37:57Madeleine Baran?

  I needed to put this question to Patrick Yu, the founder and CEO of Baby Tree.

• 38:04Madeleine Baran?

  There was just one problem. At the tone, please record your message. When you've finished recording. Hi, Mr. Yu. My name is Eva Kaufman. I'm a journalist with The New Yorker. 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, Inwo Shu. They spoke in Mandarin for almost two hours and the next evening, she patched me in for a follow-up conversation.

• 38:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, Eva, I just told Patrick that I patched in.

• 38:41Madeleine Baran?

  Oh, hey. Hi, Patrick. So nice to meet you. Thanks for making the time.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, nice to meet you.

• 38:46Madeleine Baran?

  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?

• 38:57Madeleine Baran?

  Patrick told us the story from the beginning, switching between English and Mandarin.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think at the very beginning, they told me they want 20.

• 39:07Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  关键是孩子长大很多的头痛的事情的。我我不太理解，我觉得他们也是，我怀疑真的也是这种。

• 39:33Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  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, when they come back again, they say, okay, Patrick, I still want to more baby.

• 40:16Madeleine Baran?

  When Sylvia 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.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  So I gave her a very high price package. Yeah, I just don't want that her be. Just, oh, too expensive. Okay, I will not work with you. But she still agreed that price. I'm surprised also.

• 40:49Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  That's normal. Yeah.

• 41:20Madeleine Baran?

  That's normal?

• 41:21Speaker 03

  For other parents? Yeah, similar. Yeah.

• 41:23Madeleine Baran?

  You've gotten calls for other parents who've left their children in the NICU?

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For me, I'm not surprised for that. I mean, that's the expectation, you know? You think it's happened, you should come every day, but in fact, no. Yeah, not every day.

• 41:44Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  Not only Chinese parents, American, white couple. I work with white, black. Yeah, same. It's 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.

• 42:23Madeleine Baran?

  Many of his intended parents, he said, only cared about the destination, not the journey. So Sylvia 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 Baby Tree 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.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  Too hard to find a mother. So that's the reason I didn't ask any question about how many kids you have.

• 42:56Madeleine Baran?

  And so Patrick said he didn't realize how many more kids they'd had in the course of just a few years.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  主要还是觉得因为这个法律允许，而且

• 43:05Madeleine Baran?

  He elaborated in Mandarin.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  我的想法就是只要能付得起钱，对吧，然后有律师监督的往下推进

• 43:12Madeleine Baran?

  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 Baby Tree was involved in a much deeper way than I'd previously understood.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  We have, at that time, we have two thirty-four. So we have another four.

• 43:40Madeleine Baran?

  Another four. Since Sylvia and Guojun had returned to Baby Tree, Patrick had matched them with four new surrogates. Patrick, you mentioned the four surrogates. Did those other surrogates all know that they were caring for the same couple?

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Uh, no, they don't know that.

• 43:58Madeleine Baran?

  So they just thought they were the, they were giving Sylvia her, like, first kid at that point?

• 44:03Speaker 03

  Uh, yes, yes.

• 44:06Madeleine Baran?

  I asked if he had any qualms about these misrepresentations.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  I understand your question. Yeah, I understand your question. I know, I know what you want to know. But, you know, for agencies, hard. Yeah. Most agency, they just don't ask an apparent too much question. They just take the application as, yeah, that's the reason it happens. 我们不太知道他们内部发生了什么

• 44:36Madeleine Baran?

  Inwo stepped in to translate.

• 44:41Speaker 05

  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 Sylvia.

• 44:54Madeleine Baran?

  I also asked about what I'd heard from former Baby Tree 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.

• 45:12Madeleine Baran?

  As far as what had happened with Sylvia 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 Sylvia and Guojun a refund. For the fourth surrogate, though, Patrick said, it was already too late.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  But for Elizabeth, we have nothing to do, yeah, because she's pregnant.

• 45:38Madeleine Baran?

  This was Elizabeth, the pregnant Baby Tree surrogate that Rebecca and I had discussed.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  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 is stable. Then at that time, I will talk with Elizabeth, explain the situation.

• 46:18Madeleine Baran?

  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. Sylvia showed Elizabeth pictures of her kids on her phone and said that everything that was happening was based on a misunderstanding.

• 46:36Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, let me explain, yeah. By understanding, my experience, no any agency will reject to work with them.

• 46:54Madeleine Baran?

  Why is that?

• 46:57Speaker 03

  It's about profit, yeah.

• 47:00Madeleine Baran?

  It's about profit?

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And because, you know, we can see it's legal, allowed. We didn't do nothing wrong.

• 47:13Madeleine Baran?

  It's about profit. It's legal. It's allowed. Patrick said he'd done what any other agency would have.

• 47:32Madeleine Baran?

  One day last December, I drove north through the San Gabriel Mountains, out to the desert.

• 47:40Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 47:48Madeleine Baran?

  The streets were decorated with Christmas lights and inflatable reindeer.

• 47:53Madeleine Baran?

  I was looking for Elizabeth, the Baby Tree surrogate who was still carrying one of the couple's children, but I wasn't sure if I had the right address.

• 48:02Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 48:15Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 48:37Madeleine Baran?

  "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 Sylvia."

• 48:52Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 49:04Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 49:13Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 49:22Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 49:41Madeleine Baran?

  I wasn't sure how much more to reveal.

• 49:44Madeleine Baran?

  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.

• 49:56Madeleine Baran?

  Later, I would learn that Elizabeth had given birth to a baby boy, that Sylvia hadn't been allowed to pick him up at the hospital, and that the baby had immediately been placed into foster care.

• 50:28Madeleine Baran?

  Coming up on The Journey.

• 50:33Madeleine Baran?

  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

• 50:45Speaker 04

  like we were prepared. 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 would ask to intervene in a contract action. People see this as a surrogacy case, but they're real children, very real children that are involved.

• 51:07Madeleine Baran?

  That's her. That's Sylvia. Did you see? She's in the car right there. That's her in the white Tesla. No way.

• 51:16Madeleine Baran?

  Oh my God, it is her.

• 51:20Madeleine Baran?

  Holy crap.

• 51:37Madeleine Baran?

  The Journey is written and produced by me, Ava Kaufman, senior producer Natalie Jablonsky, and producer Raymond Tungakar. Samara Freemark is the managing producer for the series. It's edited by Alison McAdam. Additional editing by Willing Davidson and Madeline Barron. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Alison Leighton Brown. This episode was mixed by Corey Shreppel. Our art is by Vartika Sharma. Art direction by Aviva Michaelov and Ben Cothe.

• 52:15Madeleine Baran?

  Fact checking, additional reporting, and translation by Inwo Sh. Our summer research assistant is Ethan Khan. Legal review by Fabio Bertoni and Ben Murray. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild, with additional support from Kiara Ortiz. Thanks also to Parker Yesko.

• 52:36Madeleine Baran?

  The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick.

• 52:41Madeleine Baran?

  If you have comments or story tips, please send them to the team at [email protected]. And make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts.