Media Blog
Blog topic: The Bernard Madoff of infertility
After Bernie Madoff’s billion dollar Ponzi scheme, stealing only a few million almost appears like a let down. Not surprisingly, little media attention was, therefore, paid to a comparatively small crook, who, nevertheless, caused considerable havoc to the infertility field when he disappeared with somewhere between one to over three million dollars in escrow funds (reports vary on the amount of missing funds). Those funds had been paid by couples who required gestational carriers (in the lay press frequently called “surrogates”).
Gestational carriers, usually in return for significant payments, agree to have embryos implanted into their uterus from couples, where the woman for medical reasons is not able to carry a pregnancy. Most frequent causes for use of carriers are absence of a uterus or medical problems that prevent a woman from going through pregnancy.
As is the practice in such circumstances, patients pay funds in advance to agencies, which recruit and provide gestational carriers. Those agencies then put these payments into segregated escrow accounts, which are drawn against, as gestational carriers reach treatment milestones, which entitle them to predetermined payments.
In a California-based tale, involving two intertwined companies, a surrogacy agency, called SurroGenesis, and an escrow company, Michael Charles Holding Company, escrow funds from over 30 patients had disappeared by the time the escrow company folded and shut its doors.
While the FBI investigates, a number of tricky legal questions have arisen, as some of the patients do not have additional resources to pay their gestational carriers according to contractually agreed to milestones in ongoing pregnancies. What are these patients to do? What are the gestational carriers to do? If an employer no longer can pay his employees, they either quit or are laid off. But how do you quit being a (pregnant) surrogate? By doing an abortion?
Media contact: 212-994-4400 x.4491
CHR's Media Blog is a compilation of potential story ideas gathered from infertility-related news, our research, and our opinion to facilitate open communication with the public on this increasingly relevant field of medicine.
Editors, reporters and producers are invited to contact CHR for background or clarification on any content posted here. Also, our team of fertility experts has considerable experience providing comments for publication on infertility-related subjects and participating on broadcast panels to share our expertise.
