The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It?

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.

Cindy Bi met her future husband on April Fools’ Day, 2016. It was a warm Friday night at Molly Magees, an Irish pub-slash-discotheque in Mountain View, California. Jorge Valdeiglesias spotted Bi on the dance floor: heart-shaped face, long black hair, snatched size-zero waist. He brought over shots of Don Julio. Bi, a Chinese immigrant and founder who’d later appear on a list of “30 of the Most Successful Early-Stage Startup Investors,” inspected his Google badge to make sure it was real. “I’m older than you,” Bi told him. She was 36 to his boyish, rumpled 28. “But it’s OK, I froze my eggs.” Valdeiglesias was shocked by Bi’s forwardness—he was just looking for a fun night—but it worked.

When she and Valdeiglesias were ready to start a family six years later, surrogacy was the obvious choice. At 43, Bi felt she was too old to be pregnant; she also said she was on a medication that could lead to complications. Bi didn’t grieve the decision. In a Facebook group for future IPs, she wrote: “I’ve been prepared for this for almost a decade.”

At first, Bi and Valdeiglesias considered implanting two embryos at once to have twins. Bi’s fertility doctor strongly discouraged that because of risks to the babies and surrogate. Instead, Bi and Valdeiglesias settled on “twiblings” gestated by separate women but born a few weeks or months apart. They’d have a protective big brother and a sweet little sister, fortuitously born in the year of the Dragon, the most auspicious sign of the Chinese zodiac.

They signed up with a Southern California–based agency, Surrogate Alternatives Inc. According to their psychological consult, Bi took an SSRI for PTSD spurred by work-related stressors, but hoped to wean off soon. SAI quickly matched the couple with a college-educated bank manager in Virginia. “She was perfect,” Bi told me. “Tall, healthy, young, good job. I showed her off to my friends. The only thing I was concerned with was she’s a single mom, but I saw past it.”

Rebecca Smith was a former professional athlete who became interested in surrogacy after watching a close friend struggle to conceive. (Although Smith’s real name is public, I’m using a pseudonym to protect her privacy. She declined to be interviewed on the record, citing the confidentiality clause and ongoing litigation.) The 34-year-old wanted to help a family who couldn’t carry their own child. As she put it in a Facebook post, she wanted to give them “the same love I found in becoming a mom.”

In her profile photos, the pale, lanky Smith mugged in denim jackets and athleisure with her 6-year-old biracial son, whom I’ll call Ellis. Smith had previously dated but told her psych evaluator that “it doesn’t work when you are a single mom.” She spent her free time coaching her son’s sports teams; she ran errands on weekends when Ellis was with his dad, who remained a good friend. She was the type of person who preferred cooking at home to eating out, who made sure to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ellis was an almost 10-pound baby. The pregnancy had been unremarkable but for the fact, perhaps, that her belly hadn’t shown until she was seven months along.

Smith signed up with SAI, a well-regarded agency founded by a surrogate more than two decades earlier. She liked that it offered its GCs numerous safeguards: IPs went through thorough vetting, including psychological screening, and all had a medical reason for pursuing surrogacy; a detailed contract between the GC and the IPs would dictate the terms; a third-party escrow would hold the money and pay Smith; she’d get allowances and reimbursements for housekeeping and maternity clothes; if Smith had to be hospitalized or miss work, she’d receive payments for lost wages and childcare. Also, Smith’s employer-provided insurance would treat the pregnancy as if it were her own baby—a major boon. Although directly paying a woman to carry your child is technically illegal in Virginia, Smith’s contract specified that all payments were “reimbursements.” She planned to use the $45,000 “reimbursement” to pay off her student loans and build an emergency fund.

Smith met Bi and Valdeiglesias in a standard video call facilitated by SAI. In her psychological evaluation, Smith seemed smitten with the couple, calling them “amazing.” The therapist wrote, “She feels they are ‘100% compatible.’” In the summer of 2023, Smith and Ellis flew out to San Francisco for the embryo transfer. Bi put them up in a nice hotel for 12 days, close to her apartment, and planned a detailed sightseeing itinerary. Smith didn’t even request reimbursement for her lost wages.

A doctor implanted Bi and Valdeiglesias’ only male embryo inside of Smith. Everyone was elated when it stuck. Bi asked Smith for permission to share a photo of the test result on Facebook, and Smith quickly agreed, inviting Bi to tag her. Bi and Smith texted all the time: Smith shared her happy nausea and impressions of Baby Leon; Bi detailed her constant travels and her search for a second GC. Smith tried to recruit her own sister for the job, then a coworker. When scary but benign early bleeding brought Smith to the ER, Bi sent her a DoorDash gift card.

But in the wake of the bleeding, Smith found something out. Bi had been posting about Smith’s health in Facebook groups, sharing test results and crowdsourcing suggestions for her treatment. Bi didn’t refer to Smith by name but included distinctive details that allowed members of the tight-knit community to identify her, which violated their contract.

Smith alerted SAI but didn’t confront Bi, perhaps calculating that it was better not to risk tainting their rapport. After all, the surrogacy relationship was unlike almost any other. Once you were pregnant, there was no going back. A new human had been—had to be—created.

In late 2023, a little more than halfway through the pregnancy, Bi got a Facebook comment that scared her. She had posted about Smith getting a new, better job; the COO of ART Risk Solutions, an insurance agency, replied, suggesting that Bi double-check whether Smith’s new policy would cover the pregnancy. Outreach like this wasn’t uncommon: The Facebook groups often teemed with industry professionals peddling their wares. The ART Risk COO offered to look into it.

While SAI’s standard process had determined that Smith’s new insurance would cover the pregnancy, ART Risk disagreed. Bi was spooked by what she saw as SAI’s oversight on a major issue: Pregnancy complications could rack up five- or six-figure bills. To Bi, the people she had paid to ensure her only son’s healthy birth seemed asleep at the wheel. Since Bi alleged SAI had “made a mistake,” she demanded they pay for Smith’s backup insurance policy. When it stood by its assessment and refused, Bi was irate.

She began posting about SAI, sometimes multiple times a day, to warn other IPs. Sometimes she said that Smith had told her about the job change, other times she claimed that Smith hadn’t notified her. She didn’t want to burden Smith. “It’s not your fault,” she assured Smith, trying to protect her from the stress while keeping her in the loop.

It seemed like they were on the same page. “I just hate that it all happened!” Smith texted Bi. “I was so excited thinking the new job was surrogate-friendly.” Bi was sure that if Smith had known otherwise, she wouldn’t have taken the job.

It wasn’t about the money. Smith’s new, subsidized Affordable Care Act plan, at $391 a month, was a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated $200,000 Bi had budgeted for the pregnancy. Bi told Smith that they would lay low until Leon was born and then go after SAI: “I want to show them what justice should look like.”

On December 15, a day on which Bi sent her more than 50 texts about the insurance, Smith felt liquid between her legs. She was 26 weeks pregnant and afraid her water had broken. The emergency room sent her home, telling her it wasn’t amniotic fluid. She should’ve been relieved, but she soon had another text from Bi: One of Bi’s lawyers wanted Smith “to sign a few forms.” Smith had already signed a power of attorney giving Bi and Valdeiglesias the ability to make decisions for Leon. Were they now asking for control over her body? (Bi declined multiple requests to show me the forms in question.)

Smith confronted Bi gently. “I guess I’m a little confused,” she said. Bi and Valdeiglesias hadn’t been calling into any of the prenatal appointments where they could ask questions. “What’s changed?”

“After your ER visit, I have tons of questions,” Bi replied. “For example, was it due to the stress of Friday’s insurance discussion? If not, what can we do to prevent such episodes so baby can grow to full term?” By this point, Bi and Valdeiglesias had found a second GC for Leon’s younger sister, and that process, Bi told Smith, was going much more smoothly.

That day, Smith was back at the clinic for follow-ups on the leaking. She’d already started taking precautions: sleeping on her left side and drinking a gallon of water a day. Again, they told her it wasn’t amniotic fluid and that stress might have been a contributor.

On January 1, 2024, 29 weeks pregnant, Smith texted Bi that she was in the ER again. This time, doctors confirmed that her water had broken. Smith was admitted to the hospital for IV antibiotics, monitoring, and steroids to help develop the baby’s lungs. She was to stay there until Leon was born.

Bi and Valdeiglesias had just celebrated New Year’s Eve in New York City. A few days later, Bi ordered Smith a tower of boxes from Amazon: coconut water, freeze-dried cantaloupe slices. But Bi also pestered Smith with questions: Why was she in the hospital, instead of just on bedrest at home? Was she submitting lost wage requests? Meanwhile, on Facebook, Bi claimed that Smith had broken their contract by not notifying her before changing jobs. A breach claim was serious. It meant that Smith was on the hook for any bills that insurance didn’t cover—potentially million-dollar-plus sums that Bi acknowledged could bankrupt Smith. (Technically, Smith had notified them: She had a text from Valdeiglesias congratulating her.)

The situation reveals one of the fundamental imbalances of surrogacy: When a surrogate breaks contract, her IPs can stop paying her and stop paying the medical bills for her pregnancy. But if an IP breaks contract—say, by sharing their GC’s private information online or withholding compensation—a GC typically has to hire a lawyer. No matter what, IPs get the baby at the end. Anything else would be considered baby selling and human trafficking.

Bi started to believe something was wrong with Leon because of photos Smith posted. She looked slim, despite being months along. You hardly look pregnant! a commenter wrote, approvingly. To Bi, this wasn’t a compliment. Everyone knew pregnant women had big bellies.

A few days into Smith’s hospitalization, Bi got news that seemed to push her over the edge. Smith phrased it like it was a good thing: Despite the premature rupture of membranes, her doctors had told her that Leon was healthy, and a growth scan estimated that he was in the 30th percentile. That didn’t sound right. The 30th percentile meant most babies measured bigger than Leon. Smith was tall—shouldn’t that make a bigger baby, Bi wondered? She had expected her son to be above average in all things.

Smith maintained that the doctor told her everything looked great. But Bi’s motherly intuition was going off. Something didn’t seem right with her son. She pressed on: Was Smith eating enough? Had she gained enough weight? “Small belly by itself, I brushed off,” Bi wrote. But “30th, water leak, small belly, is Leon being suffocated and become defective already?”

Since Bi did not have Leon in her body, where she could protect him and keep him safe, she had to do everything she could from across the country. She turned to Facebook groups and Google for second, third, and fourth opinions. On January 13, Bi emailed SAI asking for copies of Smith’s medical records.

Bi—a direct communicator who prided herself on her candor—asked her husband if she was out of line. Valdeiglesias assured her she wasn’t. “You’re just caring for your baby,” he said. “Like just what any other mother would do.”

The hardest part of being hospitalized, Smith told Bi, was saying goodbye to her son, who cried whenever she had to leave. Bi had suggested that Ellis could stay in the hospital. Ellis spent the night just twice in those weeks, sleeping on the recliner meant for new parents.

On one of those mornings, January 21, Smith woke up in the same room as her sweet, protective, now 7-year-old son. Nurses came in and did morning monitoring. Leon had no heartbeat.

When Bi got the Facebook message from an unknown woman, she thought it was a prank: “Call the hospital asap,” the woman wrote. It was Smith’s sister. “This is an emergency.”

Bi recorded her conversation with the hospital. The doctor gave her condolences: She thought she’d seen a flicker in one of Leon’s heart valves and so rushed Smith into an emergency C-section. But Leon was already dead. The placenta had separated from Smith’s uterine wall, depriving Leon of oxygen. “Typically that leads to vaginal bleeding,” the doctor explained, “which she had not been having. She did about 10 days ago.” They’d followed the standard of care by trying to keep Leon inside Smith until 34 weeks gestation. But, she said, “these things just happen sometimes. I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly why, unfortunately.”

Later, Bi got a call from Smith, who had recently woken up from general anesthesia. Snotty-nosed, crying, Smith told her she last felt Leon moving that night. Bi was confused: Smith had told her that Leon was moving more during the day and less at night. The call button was right there, Bi thought. If Smith felt Leon move, why hadn’t she alerted the nurses?

Bi and her husband arranged for flights to see their son’s body. She emailed SAI: Could the medical records be ready when she arrived at the hospital? “I didn’t sleep,” Bi said, “I was contacting attorneys.”

Smith, meanwhile, had spent several hours in surgery. Placental abruptions are a major cause of maternal mortality. According to court filings, she “lost a lot of blood and nearly died.”

Now awake, sliced through her core, she held baby Leon. He weighed 3 pounds, 12 ounces—almost exactly average for his gestational age. The child that she’d carried for seven months lay dead in her arms.

What shocked Bi, when she arrived at the hospital, was the joy she felt with her stillborn child. “He was a white boy, just like his dad.” He had light hair, a cut near his left knee, and hard-looking fingernails. Bi photographed Leon in a white gown and diaper, holding a blue crocheted heart. Bi would never know the color of his eyes.

A nurse told Bi that Smith was being discharged but wanted to speak to them. Bi said no; it was her time with her son before his autopsy. She did ask for a list of Smith’s medications.

Eight days after Leon died, Smith emailed Bi and Valdeiglesias. She understood they might not want to talk, but her heart was breaking, thinking of them. “I will forever carry the memory of your baby boy,” she wrote, “how his favorite place to kick/punch was my right rib and how he danced up a storm whenever Ed Sheeran came on.”

Back home in San Francisco, Bi felt empty. She wandered the sidewalks where she should’ve been pushing a stroller. Things were bad at home. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work. Instead she dedicated all of her time to taking screenshots and organizing folders of evidence to wage a medical malpractice lawsuit.

She also hired psychics to give her answers. As she tells it, they all blamed Smith. One suggested that an ex-boyfriend of Smith’s had turned her against Baby Leon. Another claimed to see traumas on Smith’s belly and said she was clearly having rough sex. He warned: “She has something to hide.” When Smith refused to release her medical records unless nonpregnancy information was redacted, Bi saw it as confirmation that Smith was hiding crucial details.

Bi contacted SAI, claiming that Smith had breached contract by not informing her about the insurance change on time, not taking her vitamins, and not alerting her before the C-section. “Our contract specified a ‘well-baby’ that didn’t die,” she reminded them. Bi ordered the escrow to stop paying Smith or reimbursing her medical expenses. A few days later, Bi re-listened to the recording of the worst news of her life. She noticed a detail she’d missed: Smith had bled 10 days prior to Leon’s death. No one had told her.

SAI countered that there was “no documented bleed” on the date in question but clarified that there was “some light pink fluid which the doctor was not concerned about.” SAI said Smith asked the doctors to tell Bi directly, and that the contract gave Smith two weeks to tell Bi. “That’s emergency information,” Bi said. “She should have told me right away.” If Bi had been told, she believed that Leon would be alive. She would’ve insisted on a C-section immediately.

Many stillbirth advocates believe that American doctors do not take the risk of stillbirth seriously, that the standards of care are often woefully inadequate, and that calculations about when to deliver a baby ignore risk factors. After losing a baby, women are often told, as Bi was, that these things “just happen.” Stillbirths take about 21,000 American children per year—more than guns, car accidents, sudden infant death syndrome, cancer, and fires combined.

Leon’s death “was 100 percent, 1,000 percent preventable,” Bi told me, anguished. Searching for meaning, she started attending Epic Church (known for hosting high-profile VCs). At one discussion, participants talked about “when God gives you a mission.” Bi sobbed. “I don’t want this mission, I want my son,” she thought. Upon reflection, though, she became hopeful. She thanked God for giving her trauma, because He believed she could handle it. “I will do my best to make sure it won’t happen to other people,” she promised herself. She would become her son’s voice. “I'll make sure other unborn children are protected.”

In her grief, Bi pieced together her version of events: During the pregnancy, Smith had engaged in “lots of unsafe sex.” A bout of “forceful sex” led to her leaking in mid-December. More sex eventually necessitated her hospitalization. Smith had let her “adult-sized” son sleep in her bed, where he’d probably kicked her in the stomach. Smith may have even intentionally given birth early, mistakenly believing she’d receive full compensation.

At the advice of her lawyer, Bi hired a private investigator. A reverse address lookup suggested a man shared Smith’s address—whose name Bi was sure had to be Smith’s (supposedly ex) partner. He was Black, and the PI’s report described him as having been charged with two misdemeanors. Bi believed Smith should have never been a surrogate with an “undisclosed live-in boyfriend with #felony JAIL TIME record,” as she put it online. The PI dug up a flyer advertising a New Year’s Eve party listing the man as one of the DJs, seemingly confirming Bi’s lawyer’s suspicion about what Smith had been doing the night before her hospitalization.

Bi was ready to approve an in-person surveillance operation when another detail froze her blood: Smith had gotten a speeding ticket on a day she was inpatient at the hospital. As Bi would claim online, on January 13, Smith had “snuck out” with her son, gone 40 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone, then “snuck back into” the hospital. The very next day, Smith had experienced “profuse vaginal bleeding” for “at least five hours.” In hindsight, Smith’s behavior appeared “weird” and “defensive”: The day after the bleed, Smith had asked Bi to stop posting.

Bi understood how far-fetched her allegations sounded. “If it were not for all the hard evidence, it’s too shocking to believe [Rebecca Smith] did what she did to kill my son,” Bi wrote on Facebook, using Smith’s real name. Perhaps a kind friend could have suggested to Bi that there were other explanations. Instead, Bi had a set of legal adversaries and a supportive echo chamber. On Facebook, GCs and IPs alike expressed sympathy for Bi’s tragic posts: Everyone knew bad surrogates existed, and based on Bi’s claims, it sounded like Smith was one. Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a Bay Area fertility doctor and influencer, called Smith “a criminal” and “a psycho.” Bi’s $1,275-an-hour lawyer, Elizabeth Sperling, wondered whether digging through social media posts might show Smith engaging in “strenuous activity” that could explain the death.

Bi’s husband focused on stabilizing the family, a move he credits with saving their marriage. He blamed the hospital, not Smith, but told me that the litigation is “her grieving process.” He tried to stay out of the legal stuff so that Bi couldn’t blame him too.

Smith had planned to go back to work shortly after giving birth. Instead, she couldn’t stop bleeding. Even though SAI had determined she hadn’t breached the contract, the escrow stopped paying, leaving Smith reliant on disability benefits as she faced an increasing pile of terrifying bills.

When Smith was finally cleared to return to work, a month after Leon died, Bi emailed Smith’s HR department to ask about her health plan. Bi also reported Smith to a federal agency, claiming that Smith was committing fraud. The stress on Smith was already high: Her supervisor at work had found her crying on and off for a day.

Smith hadn’t heard from Bi since her terse reply to the condolence email. Then, Bi texted her a screenshot of a Facebook post about another GC who’d had an abruption at almost 32 weeks—but that GC had called 911 and the baby had lived.

Next, Bi iMessaged a photo of Leon’s corpse to Smith’s 7-year-old son’s iPad.

In the months after Leon died, Bi:

Called the FBI 12 times. Reported Smith, SAI, the hospital, and Clarity escrow to more than a dozen state and federal regulators and numerous professional organizations. Launched a new round of her $30 million venture fund, backed by Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, President Trump’s “AI and crypto czar,” on Leon’s due date. Posted Leon’s ChatGPT-written endorsement from heaven, offering his “eternal blessings” for her work. Created TikToks, Instagram Reels, Facebook posts, X threads, LinkedIn Updates, and a website for her advocacy. Posted links disclosing Smith’s full name, photo, address, employer, mortgage license number, and son’s first name to her website. Asked her husband, again and again, how it was possible that Smith had carried her son but felt “nothing” about his death.

Bi has abandonment issues that she traces back to her twenties, when her father divorced her mom for the mistress who’d conceived his long-awaited son. She got on lithium for her bipolar disorder in early 2021 and began looking for surrogates as soon as she stopped feeling “sedated.” I spoke to the therapist Bi hired to consult with her and Valdeiglesias. She told me that, of the 792 intended parents she has evaluated for surrogacy or gamete donation in the last decade, she has declined to recommend only about a dozen. “I’m not gatekeeping,” she said. When it comes to serious mental illness, she added, it’s up to them to disclose. One of Bi’s fertility doctors, meanwhile, told me it’s not his place to scrutinize intended parents. He defers to the recommendation of the psychological interviewer.

If an intended parent gets turned down, they can usually find another therapist, another clinic, another agency. But without anyone questioning her plans, Bi seemed betrayed by the challenges of third-party reproduction. “Surrogacy is supposed to be the safest route,” she wrote on Instagram. It wasn’t just Leon’s death that pushed Bi into her spiral of legal action and social media posts. It was the apparent lack of control of having her child inside another woman’s body—the most basic fact of surrogacy.

On Facebook, strangers started calling for Smith to rot in jail and lose custody of her son. She and her family feared online vigilantes would search out the woman Bi portrayed as a profit-minded baby killer. Smith’s parents bought security cameras for her car, then Smith moved back in with her son’s father, then moved again. She changed jobs, hoping to spare her small office the chaos. Bi contacted Smith’s next employer too, saying Smith had been fired for fraud and lied on her application. Smith’s sister feared violence.

Smith had suicidal thoughts. She wondered if her son would be better off if she were dead, if that meant Bi would never send him another disturbing message.

In June, Bi sued Smith and the other parties she blamed for Leon’s death. When a judge ruled that Bi had to follow the original contract and do private arbitration instead of a public lawsuit, she spent $25,000 appealing the decision. One day at work, in front of her new colleagues, a man served Smith papers naming Bi and Valdeiglesias as Leon’s parents. Smith’s pro bono lawyer advised her to acknowledge the papers without realizing that Bi’s lawyer—the husband of Bi’s psych consultant—had added a section forcing Smith to release her medical records. After another court battle, the judge threw out that requirement.

Whatever loophole existed, Bi would find it. If Smith relaxed, she would take advantage. “The only goal she had was to destroy my life,” Smith wrote in a court document: to get her fired from her job so she couldn’t support her son. To have her behind bars. To bankrupt her. To make it so Smith could never be at peace while Leon was dead.

In the fall of 2024, Bi was served papers. Smith had filed a restraining order. Smith maintained that she’d been single and lived alone with her son; she’d never “snuck out” of the hospital—nurses permitted her to go home to pick up an obscure vitamin Bi had asked her to take; the doctors had advised her not to create extra stress by telling Bi about the minor bleeding; she’d asked SAI to inform Bi about it. Smith’s supporters said that after the stillbirth, she’d volunteered at the Ronald McDonald House for the NICU, sponsored a gold leaf on a tree for angel babies, pumped and donated her breastmilk to feed fragile babies in Leon’s honor.

Bi found these claims ridiculous. “She kidnapped and killed my son.”

“I am the victim here,” Bi told me repeatedly. Being a “single mom,” she said, “doesn’t give you the right to kill another son. You don’t have that victim card to play.” She was almost screaming when she said it. Bi explains over and over her belief that surrogates hold all of the power. There are far more intended parents than surrogates—between three and 10 times as many—and IPs are, as Bi put it online, in “such a disadvantaged position.” Once a GC has the embryo inside of them, they can harm the baby. Therefore, IPs are at their whim.

Bi sees a model for surrogacy in the antiabortion laws that “recognize and protect the right of a fetal life.” The baby, she believes, should come first. Bi thinks that when doctors see surrogates go against medical advice, they should report it to the police.

Bi isn’t anti-surrogacy—in fact, she frequently advises other investors who are pursuing it and sends me links to startup after startup. Sheel Mohnot, a venture capitalist friend of Bi’s who has commissioned twiblings, said the problem is that information is siloed when “each agency has their own database of wombs.” In this model, surrogates are the gestational equivalents of Uber drivers or Amazon warehouse workers. “There should be a database of carriers allowing us to filter on what we want: age, BMI, willingness to abort the fetus,” Mohnot said.

Six months after Leon’s death, Bi’s daughter was born. In an Instagram announcement, Bi sits in a hospital recliner wearing a medical gown, clutching a newborn to her chest. Bi often compared her two surrogacy experiences—“I had the world’s worst GC, and the best”—and told me for months that everything with Chelsea Sanabria had been easy and smooth.

Not quite. Sanabria told me she had a great relationship with Bi but a pregnancy plagued with placental issues: first, gestational diabetes; then placenta previa, where the placenta blocks the cervix, which led to a hospitalization and a scheduled C-section. When doctors removed the baby, they found that the placenta had grown too deeply into her uterine wall, a condition known as placenta accreta. Once they removed the placenta, Sanabria began losing blood. As a nursing student and patient care technician, she knew what was going on as they called out numbers of blood loss—ultimately an astounding 5.4 liters. “The weirdest part was being awake” while she was dying, she said. An emergency hysterectomy saved her life. She woke up nine hours later, intubated, in the ICU.

A 2024 survey found that naturally conceived pregnancies carry about a 2 percent risk of several adverse maternal events. A surrogate pregnancy increases that to almost 8 percent. Nobody had talked to Sanabria about these risks. Now, she posts online to educate other surrogates.

As Bi pointed out repeatedly in her quest to get Leon’s placental slides, the placenta comes from the DNA of the biological parents—hers and Valdeiglesias’. In fact, Bi’s mother and sister developed diabetes while pregnant, an issue stemming from the placenta, and remained diabetic. Valdeiglesias told me that his aunt had her water break early, but everything was fine.

But Bi and Valdeiglesias’s family medical histories were not disclosed to their surrogates. This is normal. If Bi and Valdeiglesias have a third child, they almost certainly won’t disclose their pregnancy complications.

“Imagine a journey being treated like a human incubator and not like a person,” Smith wrote in a Facebook group for GCs. “Imagine a journey where the intended parents leave you to pay all of the medical bills.”

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills are in Smith’s name, which could wreck her credit. Smith’s employer-provided insurance initially agreed to pay but revoked coverage after Bi emailed them alleging fraud. Now, the plan Bi bought isn’t paying out either. Bi maintains that Smith is responsible. Just as Bi warned in a Facebook group, the bills could bankrupt Smith.

During a Zoom hearing last December, Bi considered mercy. Perhaps Smith had suffered enough; perhaps Bi had already achieved a form of justice. Inspired with grace, Bi said she made an offer: If Smith dropped the restraining order and allowed Bi to talk freely about her, using her full name, Bi wouldn’t pursue criminal charges.

Smith’s lawyer refused, so Bi contacted local police. (In Virginia, police have investigated pregnancy losses and put a stillbirth mom behind bars.) If that fails, Bi hopes to nail Smith for perjury based on the “lies” in her restraining order application. In order to avoid a permanent restraining order, Bi signed a court-enforced confidentiality agreement not to talk about Smith. But Bi now views that agreement as toothless. It appears nothing—not even the specter of being found in contempt of court—will stop Bi from sharing her truth. Though it’s highly unlikely, Bi could even go to jail: There’s an arrest warrant out for Bi in Virginia for doxing Smith.

So far, Bi has worked with nine different attorneys. She racked up almost $750,000 in legal bills in 2024 but paid less than half; the law firm where Elizabeth Sperling works, owed $200,000, said it “intends to initiate a proceeding”; her appeals lawyer, also owed $200,000, keeps threatening to send her to collections. “I cannot pay you because if I do, then I cannot get another lawyer,” Bi explained. She needs the money to pay her next retainer. Lawyers never ask Bi about money: “They see my profile and they assume I can pay.”

But Bi tells me she’s cash poor. Although Bi had an eight-figure net worth before Leon’s death, most of it was illiquid stakes in companies. She has rent to pay ($10,000 a month) and childcare (her sixth live-in nanny). She had to withdraw her management fees for her investment fund much faster than planned. Bi hasn’t worked much since Leon died, but she doesn’t know how she can continue as a venture capitalist if she backs down. “If I cannot protect my son,” Bi says, “if I cannot give him honor, sue the hell out of these people, and have some sense of justice … how can the investment founders say, ‘Cindy, you’re the best?’”

Just when it seemed like Bi might not be able to stomach, or afford, more lawsuits, she found someone who would represent her without charging hourly. “Pitbull attorney” Doug Rochen has the kind, open face of a Midwestern pastor. He’s gotten eight-figure payouts for abused foster children and mistreated prisoners and specializes in sexual abuse cases. Bi says Rochen will sue the doctors and the hospital for malpractice and pursue arbitration against Rebecca Smith, SAI, and other parties in exchange for 40 percent of Bi’s winnings.

Meanwhile, Bi and her husband have been hunting for their third surrogate. In the spring, Bi emailed with The Biggest Ask agency about “a great surrogate profile”: another single mother, of two, who lives with her parents. But she hesitated: Should she give her daughter a little sister or use the money to “pursue justice” for her son? “I just can’t pull the trigger,” Bi told me. Not yet.

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