IVF Disrupted Ep 5: The Baby Project

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This series features conversations about pregnancy, complications and loss. Please take care while listening. It's October of twenty twenty three. I want you to meet Kendall. She works the front desk at one of kind Body's Chicago clinics. Her title is patient coordinator.

And that week I was on mail duty. So that means that you have to go to open up all the mail. You have to distribute it where it goes for the doctors. And so I opened it and we do peruse them like we do have to read them because they're like if we don't read them, then we don't know how to trickle it up or what to do with it.

This part of the job was usually pretty mundane, but on this day, a letter addressed to doctor Angie Beltzos, Kind Body's chief medical officer stopped Kendall cold. Kendall isn't her real name. Like others in this series, she asked us to give her a pseudonym when speaking about the company.

So I read this in the office and my jaw hit the floor because I was like, what do you mean.

What do you actually mean? We're doing this?

Kendall couldn't hide her disbelief. Her coworker immediately.

Noticed and she was like, what are you reading? And I was like, dude, I literally looked at her out. I don't know what I'm reading because I was so taken aback by this letter, and so I gave it to her and she was like Jesus Christ, and I go, what am I supposed to do with this? What am I supposed to do with this?

The letter was sent by a woman who said she'd been an egg donor and she was writing to Warren doctor Beltzos about the man she donated her eggs too, a billionaire named Greg Lindberg. The woman had donated her eggs to Greg back in twenty eighteen, and she had the procedure done at a Chicago clinic which was then run by Bios, a fertility chain that Angie Beltzos found it before it was acquired by kind Body. I asked Kendall to read the letter.

Hello, doctor Angeline Belzo's this masters pertains to your patient Greg. I am one of his egg donors that went through Bios in twenty eighteen.

The woman then references a phone call she says she made to doctor Beltzo's back in twenty twenty, I called you.

To disclose the truth regarding my egg donation experience at BIOS. I informed you that I had undergone the egg donation under duress and had been deceived by mister Lindbergh, who had failed to fulfill the promised compensation for the egg donation.

The woman calls the entire egg donation experience quote completely unethical and traumatizing, and she references other women who she says were also pressured to do things they were uncomfortable with.

The letter goes on to say.

That Limberg continued to have more children from other donors and surrogates after the woman reached out to doctor Beltzoe's and that during some of that time, Lindberg was in prison for bribing an insurance commissioner.

Mister Lindbergh currently has at least five or more egg donors involved in different clinics across the USA. The number is increasing. In twenty twenty two, mister Lindberg managed to re create twins through surrogates while incarcerated in a federal prison, indicating that his family is continually expanding through the helps of these fertility clinics.

Over the last six years, Lindberg has had nine children with the help of donors and surrogates. Documents I've reviewed show that three of Lindberg's babies were born while he was in prison, and two of them with the help of BIOS and later Kind Body. I've also seen surrogate contracts that Limberg electronically sign from behind bars, which listed doctor Baltzos as the designated medical provider and Lindbergh as

The woman says he.

Originally promised to tell her when he used her embryos and whether any children were created, but she says she doesn't trust him to be honest about that. She ends it by writing.

I sincerely hope that you took my phone call in twenty twenty seriously and kept ethics in mind, and that you have not assisted mister Lindberg in his efforts to create additional children.

Sincerely, the patient.

So the letter addressed to kind Body painted a disturbing picture of what it suggested the company was taking part in. Kind Body said that it didn't acquire bios until years after the first stages of Lindberg's baby project. It declined to comment further for this podcast. Doctor Baltzos didn't respond to interview requests from Bloomberg and iHeart podcasts. You're listening to IVF disrupted the kind Body story. I'm your host, Jackie Devalos.

You've heard how.

Kind Body is a fertility chain that operates like a startup. Much of its funding came from venture capital and private equity firms, and it's push to expand quickly, to open more clinics, to bring in more patients, and to make more profits. Its founder, Gina Bartesi, compared the company to a rocket ship to the moon, and she once suggested to a group of employees that they would make so

I remember I was trying to collect payment for one of the services and I couldn't collect the payment, and they're like, oh, do this, this, this, this, and this, and I was like, okay, well I did that. So I had to call my manager and then my manager was like, oh ha ha, we do it this way because he's in prison.

And I was like, Dad is so weird, Kendall said. Some things were off.

Lind Berg's assistant coordinated appointments for egg donors and surrogates.

This was widely known at the clinic.

She remembered one day when one of linn Berg's surrogates checked in for an appointment.

I would do my normal Greek for hi, welcome in. Can I have your first and last? And I just remember she wouldn't make eye contact with me. She kept saying everything, but she was looking down. She wasn't trying to not connect, but she wasn't trying to involve herself. And the assistant was doing a lot of the talking too.

This wasn't how it usually worked.

Normally, the intended parents would come with the carrier and if the partner is available, they come. But it was just all very strange, just strange behavior, strange how we danced around the looke holes. It was almost like everything was catered around him.

Lindberg built his fortune first through his private equity firm ELI Global, which bought businesses in a wide range of industries medical coders, travel firms, a seller of sports collectibles. But it was buying up insurance companies that made Lindberg a billionaire. In twenty twenty, a consulting firm pegged his net worth at his highs, about one point five billion dollars.

I pieced this.

Together by reviewing thousands of pages of company documents, legal, medical and financial records. I also conducted dozens of interviews with Lindberg's former employees, clinic workers, ex girlfriends, egg donors,

I'm going to bring it to my manager and her higher up her manager, and so I brought it up to them. They had me scan it over to them, and it was basically like, okay, well we'll handle this now.

Were you expecting what kind of reaction? Were you expecting shock and awe?

Definitely shock and all, but there was no shock and there was no awe, Like it was just like another day run of the mill for them. They were just like, oh yeah, totally. And I was like, this is huge, and I go, should I present this letter to doctor Beltzo's And I remember my manager specifically telling me do not give it to doctor Beltzos, and so I was like, what can be done.

I spoke to the woman who sent the letter to doctor Beltzos. She was one of Lindbergh's egg donors. She didn't want to be recorded for this podcast for fear of retribution, but she told me that when she spoke with doctor Beltzos in twenty twenty, the doctor suggested she should watch YouTube meditation videos and relax. I reached out to doctor Beltzo's last year before my investigation was published, and again for this podcast. She has not responded to

No one replied to her.

Gina Bartesi declined to comment for this series. I wanted to know more about how Lindbergh's baby project was seen by other fertility clinics and doctors. In the course of my reporting, I learned that Lindberg had actually been denied treatment at another fertility clinic. It happened when he first embarked on this quest in twenty eighteen, he went to Duke Fertility Center. Lindberg was upfront about what he was doing.

He wanted to.

Have four surrogates pregnant. At the same time, he told the doctor at Duke that he had already arranged for a woman to be paid one point five million dollars to donate her eggs, and one of his assistants would carry the first baby. According to three people who were involved in the baby project at this time, the doctor.

Refused to treat him.

They said she was troubled by what she heard, but I wanted to know why she wouldn't talk to me, so I interviewed more than two dozen doctors, embriologists, and psychologists. I wanted to understand what a fertility clinic is supposed to do when something like this comes up. There are some enforceable guardrails on who can donate eggs. The FDA requires fertility clinics to collect a donor's medical history and test for infectious diseases. The rest is left up to

One of the big things you're also trying to make sure isn't going on is a level of coercion, either overt or assumed. But that doesn't mean you really want to do it.

But are you?

Are you in a position where you can say no? If somebody can't say no, it doesn't really feel like a free choice any longer.

There isn't a cap on how much egg donors can be paid for their eggs. Most donors are paid somewhere between eight and twenty five thousand dollars. Lindbergh was paying his donors as much as one point five million dollars. Doctors I spoke to said this would be a major red flag because for some donors that amount of money is kind of impossible to pass up. Another thing that Lindbergh wanted to do was to have multiple women pregnant at the same time. Doctor's wifele said this should have

We have to treat the carrier as a human who could be harmed, and I don't want carriers to be harmed. And intended parents, I'm really trying to get a sense of are they going to respect this person, Do they see them as a whole human They're not just I'd never use the word oven. Oven is a piece of equipment you know this is a person.

There was another problem with Lindbergh's baby project. His first surrogate was his assistant. She had worked for him at his private equity firm.

You can't have an employee of yours beer carrier, because that is coercion like, because she will feel she can't say no right because now she's at risk of losing her job.

Lindbergh was able to do what he did because without regulation, America's fertility industry is a marketplace for almost anything is possible if you have enough money.

When it comes to third party reproduction, we're in a really weird, sticky place.

That's doctor Brian Levine. He's a founding doctor at CCRM New York. It's part of a big chain of fertility clinics that is owned by private equity.

And the reason is weird and sticky. He has this unregulated and unchecked. There is no national registry in America to know how many times someone has donated X, nor how many times someone has donated a sperm.

And yet, even to doctor Levine, Greg Lindberg stood out.

I've never had a patient say to me, I want to get three D surrogates pregnant in one year, never seen it, never had it happen. I've heard of it, but I've never actually had that clinical experience.

What Lindbergh wanted went beyond anything doctor Levine had encountered in his career. Multiple donors at the same clinic, surrogates who were employees, payments that dwarfed normal compensation. But the system has no mechanism to stop it.

There's no laws. It's an unregulated space. There's laws by the FDA, the Fund and Drug Administration, there's laws of reporting by the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, But when it comes to who has the opportunity to work with a surrogate, it's very clear that is up the discretion of the treating physician.

Lindbergh's efforts might sound extreme, but he's taking part in a small but high profile trend wealthy men having a large number of children to fulfill their reproductive ambitions. Elon Musk, who has fathered at least fourteen children, has repeatedly warned about population collapse and urged more people to have more babies,

A lot of things just kind of went through holes, and the holes just lined up in this one scenario where they person went from checkbook to baby. And I will argue that leadership starts at the top, and so that was pervasive in this clinic where it happened with multiple individuals, even though they were all assigned to one intended parent. I would argue that there was a dangerous

For the woman who tried to sound the alarm with her letter, going through the courts wasn't going to yield the accountability she wanted. She felt the clinic bore some responsibility because after all, she was.

A patient too.

She'd warned doctor Beltsos multiple times, there were no consequences for Limberg. Kendall, the kind Body employee who opened the letter, was frustrated that the clinic wasn't doing anything. She told her superiors, she told her colleagues.

And so I was like, what can be done? And I was talking to my other coworker who was well aware of this situation, and she goes, we just don't do anything about it. We just don't just leave it. And I was like, no, that's not right. What struck me was like reading that letter. I was like, this woman is in pain, and I can't imagine her experience and what she had to go through.

According to Kendall, Lindbergh wasn't the only patient that kind Body was accepting that other clinics were hesitant to treat, like women in their fifties or patients who were considered too overweight to be eligible for IVF.

Working at kind Body, we were like the dumpster fire. That was our model, Like you would come to us if everyone else denied you, because we would put you through.

Kind Body framed this as a point of pride by They're telling they were expanding access to anyone who wanted to have a baby, But to Kendall, after everything she had seen. This wasn't out of compassion, It was at greed.

I just saw over and over and over again, them pushing through these geriatric patients that were not getting the results, and then every single time they just changed protocol to say, oh, next time it will be it. But then you have some patients that are going through twenty one rounds being older, and they're just told oh, next time, Oh, next time, But no one's having the real conversation and being transparent with these patients. There was women in their fifties and men in their seventies.

At this stage, the chances of getting pregnant are lower, so these older patients often ended up spending more money on IVF than people in their thirties and forties.

There was so much that fell in between the cracks, because again it was kind of like get them in, retrieve, transplant, get them out, like that was that was it. And I do think a lot of it got lost in lost in between, you know, just because so many people are coming in, but we're not looking at I don't know, we're not keeping the morality compass in mind. Like I do think a lot of times morals were thrown out, and just the price tag was what was making the

I said, do not go to kind Body.

So this is the thorny situation that the IVF industry finds itself in. In this series, you've heard from many patients who feel they've been harmed and disillusioned employees who think that kind Body and the larger industry should do better. They're begging for improvements, but does the industry have the will to change. By twenty twenty four, kind Body was in a full financial crisis. They'd burn through investor money

So they told us Crest Hill was closing, and I was like, oh, okay, so we're gonna like have transferred time, like it's closing, but there's They were saying that they were going to phase things out, and the next day I came in and it was like, oh, no, Crest Hills closed, and I was like, we.

What do you mean?

Patients were losing their minds and we were just told, oh, handel it as best you can.

Patients discovered their clinics had shuttered through phone calls with frantic receptionists. Some were right in the middle of treatment, they had retrievals scheduled, and their bodies were flooded with thousands of dollars worth of fertility drugs. Others had embryo transfers on the calendar for just the following week.

Our phones were ringing like every minute of every single day because no one knew what was going on, and we were told like an exert of what to say, but like these patients were still flying blind. They didn't know what was happening, and kind body was not giving them that information. And the information that they were giving them was like half asked, Oh, don't worry, you'll still get the best.

Care, and I was like, girl, this is not the best care right now.

And because they did that, we we had to absorb so many patients in the Chicago offices.

Then the Detroit clinic closed.

I remember specifically there was a woman that was supposed to get a transfer done like the next week that Detroit had closed, and this woman called me sobbing. She was like, I have to do these things you're telling me, I have to go to another clinic.

After all of this, Kendall hit her breaking point, and.

So I was like, I'm like officially done with this company because the only thing you all are interested in is money.

According to a document I saw and people with knowledge of the matter, the company was scrambling for ten million dollars in bridge financing just to keep the lights on. The rocket ship was sputtering. In December twenty twenty four, Bloomberg BusinessWeek published My investigation into Lindbergh's baby project. A Kind Body spokeswoman said in a statement at the time that Bloomberg's reporting was quote categorically false. Kind Body said it had hired an outside law firm to conduct an

At the end of the day, she has a brilliant mind, she's a great businesswoman. All those things I won't take that away from her, and she was always very lovely to me.

So any are you surprised she resigned?

Yeah, we're staying down again, which I'm sure it probably killed her to do, I would think, because this is like your baby, right, she started it from nothing and built it into what it was.

Dozens of people I talked to who worked at kind Body said that at some point the company lost its way, that it's strayed from its original mission. Tracy was dismayed by what my reporting on Lindbergh and his baby project had revealed.

When you posted that story about the millionaire, I sent it to my family.

I was like, literally like has no bottom, Like I'm seething when I I can't believe it?

Do you?

How do you go that far and then continue to go and double down?

Now? Where are all those kids?

Honestly, where are all those babies?

And who has them?

Are their mothers?

Okay?

But as long as the clinic's taking money though, you see what I'm saying, Like, that's crazy, it's scary.

I asked kind Body about its internal review of the allegations related to Greg Lindberg. The company declined to say what it found. Kind Body continues to operate, though in a diminished form. In the past year, it's closed six clinics, including in Portland, Columbus, and Vancouver. The company opened one new clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina, after years of trying to get it off the ground, but plans in other cities,

Don't get me into there on this cheerleading Pom pom women empowerment.

It's going to be a great esthetic.

It's going to have the holistic aspect. You didn't give me anything. You took away my career, you tarnished my name, or whatever you did to never get me hired again.

Dozens of former employees told me kind Body had a culture of fear and intimidation that made it difficult to speak out.

I found out about.

Some instances where employees who raised concerns about how the business was being run or abruptly sued when they quit in protest. Throughout my reporting, kind Body sent legal letters to people that suspected of speaking with me. They threatened to sue if they spoke out about the company. As kind body struggles in the industry became more widely known, former employe like Tracy told me they felt like their careers were tainted by having kind Body on the resume.

I told you in that first the first time we spoke. I knew once I spoke, I was done and it was really hard to get a job and to find some stability. So if I'm going from not having money to buy food for my kids and for myself and to get to where I am now, I could still sleep at night. I'm really sad that it came to all that, because they really had some talented, really great people working for them, and they really had a great idea to help women because it wasn't just treating the

In twenty twenty five, kind Body appointed a new CEO, David Stern. He was previously the CEO of Boston IVF, a fertility network that is widely respected by people in the industry, and before that he worked at various healthcare companies in operational or management roles. He's not a doctor, he's a business guy. Employees I spoke to, past and current have high hopes that David will turn the company around.

We'll be right back.

David Stern's appointment signals that kind Body is trying to turn things around, But the problems I've uncovered at this company are symptoms of something much bigger. Over the past two and a half years of reporting, I kept coming back to the same question, how did we get here?

The vast majority of the errors are unknown by the public. They are probably unknown by the patients themselves. People aren't told that there arers, and in fact, maybe even the fertility clinic doesn't know their errors. The instances that we know of where the wrong embryo was transferred to somebody because that embryo belonged to another couple, how do we know about that. It's because the child is of a

Adam has represented some very high profile embryo mix ups over the years. It's given him a deep sense of the disconnect between how clinics present themselves and what's actually going on in the lab.

The reason we don't.

Know the true scope of errors and fertility clinics comes down to two things. First, there's no requirement for clinics to track or report their mistakes. Unlike hospitals, which must report certain adverse events, or airlines which must report in your Missus, fertil clinics can keep their errors secret. Second, when patients do discover mistakes and hire lawyers like Adam,

So when you go into a fertility clinic in the United States. That lobby is beautiful. I mean it looks like you are in a four seasons hotel and you go behind the door that leads into a laboratory, and all of a sudden, I mean, you've entered into an entirely different space where there can be canister is knocked over, clothes on the ground, it can be dirty, and you go from the four seasons lobby to the back of a restaurant.

Adam was speaking about IVF clinics generally there. He declined to say whether he had cases involving kind body. Adam is one of the few voices clamoring for more oversight in the fertility industry. When I reached out to doctors, embryologists, and other experts in the field, some people agreed, But I also found that many many people would approach the subject of regulation with me at all because they were afraid that even the mention of government oversight might tangle

Since Roe v.

Wade was overturned in twenty twenty two, Republicans have introduced a wave of fetal personhood bills in state legislatures around the country that would give fetuses and sometimes embryos, legal rights, and in February of twenty twenty four, the Alabama Supreme Court sided with couples who sued an IVF clinic after some of their embryos were accidentally destroyed. They sued for wrongful death and negligence, and the court sided with them, ruling that frozen embryos are unborn children.

That embryo is in the eyes of many a person, and so they believe that that embryo should have the full rights of a living human being. And that may mean things like, gosh, you can't freeze them. And if any harm was to come to that embryo, in some people's minds, that might be a kin to murder.

That's barb Koleura. She's been lobbying for fertility rights for over twenty years. If embryos were people, like the Alabama Supreme Court said, then handling them was suddenly a huge libel. If something happened, it was tantamount to murder. In the immediate aftermath, several clinics in the state paused offering IVF treatment it was too risky. This ruling changed the political landscape. Overnight, politicians who'd never mentioned fertility treatment suddenly had to take positions.

What we see is policy recommendations that are called health and safety, and they're not about health and safety. They're really about restricting access to IVF. And when we look at those policy proposals, they don't look like they're good for patients. Has nothing to do with making it safer, has nothing to do with making it more accessible or even improving the outcomes.

This is a tricky situation. Barb and many people in the fertility field I've spoken to fear any new rules around IVF because keep in mind, Barb has worked for two decades to ensure access to IVF and to push for insurance coverage. All of a sudden she's having to fight anti abortion activists. But then, what about all I've

And so regulation could be a code word for restriction. We have to look at every attempt at that, But what I am focused on are those attempts where it is to restrict and not help patients.

So that's the tension in a nutshell. In the current political climate, any attempt at regulation risks being weaponized by those who want to eliminate IVF entirely. The industry is at a stalemate.

I would say that in healthcare behavior change happens for three reasons. One it's regulation, so there's full they have to Two it's financial incentives they make more if they do it. Or three is patient demand. Patients demand it and require it. There is no government regulation or self regulation.

That's Lindsay Beck. She's a patient advocate and she's passionate about this work. When she was told two she was diagnosed with a rare tongue cancer. She had her eggs frozen back in the nineties when egg freezing was rare. It preserved her ability to have a family, and since that experience, she's spent decades trying to navigate this tension between access and safety standards in IBF for other families.

Women want reproductor of autonomy and investors want growth, but then there are sometimes when it's misaligned.

She points to one easy fix, digital tracking of sperm, eggs and embryos. She's also a firm believer in mandating that clinics report errors.

Yes, no one wants them. No one wants from more government reporting. No one wants to have to report errors. No one wants patience to know these numbers because it's scary.

Lindsey is a bit of an outlier in the industry. You don't often hear someone who is actively working in fertility calling for change. The demand for fertility services isn't slowing down. According to the latest data from the CDC, the number of IVF cycles performed in the United States has more than doubled over the past decade, with more than four hundred thousand cycles performed annually, and that number