By Jackie Davalos & Sophie Alexander

Disgraced tycoon Greg Lindberg built a network of egg donors and surrogates. Several say he conned them—and that US fertility clinics helped him do it.

As Anya walked into the fertility clinic for an appointment to have her eggs retrieved, she was already starting to panic. The modern miracle of in vitro fertilization has scary moments for all women, but she had extra reason to be nervous.

A native of Kazakhstan, Anya was working in the US as a model and actress. (The name is a pseudonym.) Her billionaire boyfriend had swept her off her feet, promising her a family and a loving future in the States. The only catch, he told her, was that he wanted kids yesterday, so she’d need to begin the IVF process as soon as possible. Then, if fertilization was successful, a surrogate would carry the embryo to term. If Anya didn’t start IVF, he’d dump her and move on.

Her boyfriend attached several other conditions, too. He directed her to a clinic in Chicago and said to pose as an acquaintance of his, tell them he was paying her the standard-ish $10,000 for her donation and sign forms waiving her rights to the eggs, including parental rights if any of them became children. He said he’d consider her the kid or kids’ mother, though, and would set her up with $1.5 million. Anya followed through with the lies and the forms. In preparation for the retrieval, she injected herself with hormones for weeks to kick her ovaries into overdrive. She endured the mood swings, the bloating, the painful cramps. But as she sat half-naked on the table with a sheet of doctor’s-office paper draped over her lower half, her boyfriend had just about all the power. If she ever fell out with him, or he found someone else, or he just changed his mind, she’d be screwed.

A person present that day, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, says Anya’s distress was obvious. Instead of asking if she was OK, or offering her more time to think things over, the clinicians pressed on with the retrieval, this person says. And they succeeded, collecting more than 20 eggs.

The following year, in 2019, a surrogate gave birth to Anya’s biological son, Oliver (also a pseudonym). For Anya, who’s now 33 and living in Los Angeles, it’s plainly been the joy of her life to know that Oliver is in the world. But she hasn’t seen her 5-year-old son in almost four years, because her now-ex-boyfriend used the papers she signed to cut her out of the boy’s life.

By then, Anya knew there were other women like her out there. What she didn’t know was just how many. She didn’t want to comment for this story and signed a contract barring her from disclosing the identity of Oliver’s father. To learn it, and further details of their arrangement, independently sourced legal, medical and financial records were reviewed, and conducted dozens of interviews with the man’s former employees, clinic workers, ex-girlfriends, egg donors and surrogates. Oliver’s father is a disgraced insurance tycoon named Greg Lindberg.

At his peak, Lindberg controlled several insurance companies and had a net worth of more than $1 billion. Over the past several years, he’s been twice convicted in federal court of bribery and is facing as many as 30 years in prison. He served almost two years before his first conviction was overturned in 2022 on procedural grounds; he’s now awaiting sentencing for the second conviction. In November he pleaded guilty in a separate federal case to money laundering and fraud conspiracy charges with a maximum of 15 years attached. These stemmed from a $2 billion scheme to funnel money from his insurance companies into a web of other entities for his personal benefit. None of his legal troubles, however, seemed to put much of a dent in what he called “the baby project.”

Today, Lindberg has at least 12 kids, including nine born over the past five years or so. He’s the sole parent caring for eight of them, who live with him near Tampa. The rest are either living with his ex-wife or another woman who’s a business associate-slash-fiancée. Six or more were born through a network of egg donors and surrogates that encompassed at least 25 women, a network that Lindberg seems to have built largely through manipulation and deceit. Before prison, he often courted multiple women simultaneously, along the lines Anya experienced. Several people with direct knowledge of his motivations say he sought out partners with distinctly Aryan looks. Two say Lindberg was obsessed with having as many as 50 kids. Five egg donors say that if they’d known the whole truth, they wouldn’t have gone through with it.

“I assumed it was for a family in Los Angeles,” says one woman, a model, who agreed to donate eggs to Lindberg through an anonymous process while he was in prison. She says Lindberg’s associate-slash-fiancée told her the recipient was a family that couldn’t conceive, but that she started to suspect otherwise when she never heard back from the lawyer who’d been hired to help her parse the contract. When she got a message asking if she’d ever donated eggs, she recalls, “I just knew it was something bad.” Like the other Lindberg donors and surrogates interviewed for this story, she spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation. Among other things, Lindberg can be litigious and has acknowledged surveilling women.

America’s booming $10 billion fertility industry has been the answer to many parents’ prayers, assisting in 2% of US births and accounting for almost 100,000 babies a year. The field has grown in importance despite decades of opposition from anti-abortion extremists, which has led even some mainstream Republican politicians to decry IVF as tantamount to murder when it involves the destruction of nonviable or unused embryos. Industry lobbying groups have steadfastly opposed measures to restrict access to the technology, and for a generation now, they’ve mostly succeeded.

Yet this defensive crouch has had consequences. Notably, it has made it difficult for governments to take open, measured steps to oversee the fertility industry, which has left it essentially self-regulated. This has kept the field more vulnerable to abuse by bad actors, especially those with means.

For all its seeming manipulation and deception, not to mention its eugenicist undertones, most elements of Lindberg’s baby project were perfectly legal. At least one clinic turned him away, but several didn’t. The facility Lindberg relied on most, which he was paying a small fortune in fees, opted to keep working with him even when confronted with concerns from its own staff and at least one of the egg donors. “This situation is emblematic of the consumerization of IVF in America,” says Brian Levine, founding partner of the clinic CCRM Fertility of New York, who hasn’t worked with Lindberg in any capacity. “We need more checks and balances.”

Lindberg participated in hours of phone and sit-down interviews for this story earlier this year, speaking at length about his use of IVF and his ambitions for a large family. In the months leading up to publication, however, he cut off contact and filed a lawsuit against the writers of this story, alleging defamation, slander and “interference” in his relationship with a particular surrogate. Neither he nor his lawyers responded to a detailed request for comment in late November. When he was contacted through the tablet messaging system he’s been using while locked up in a North Carolina jail, he blocked us.

During a phone interview in May, Lindberg credited his younger children’s existence to a “wonderful infrastructure of very helpful lawyers and doctors.” The process can be costly, he said, but when dealing with the fertility industry, “I didn’t feel any resistance at all.”

The fertility industry includes services such as genetic screenings and embryo banking, but mostly it means IVF. There are about 500 fertility clinics in the US, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the use of IVF and related technologies has more than doubled here over the past decade. Even so, oversight has remained scattered across a patchwork of nonprofits and government agencies. The CDC tracks live birth rates, and the US Food and Drug Administration requires fertility clinics to conduct a physical exam of each egg donor and test for infectious diseases. In practice, clinics mostly set their own guidelines through an industry group called the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, or ASRM. Compliance is voluntary.

Here’s how things generally work. On average, US egg donors receive $5,000 to $25,000, paid for by the intended parents or the egg bank that recruits them, according to data tracker FertilityIQ. The idea is that donors shouldn’t be “unduly” motivated or coerced by the money, according to ASRM guidelines. ASRM also frowns on intended parents seeking to employ multiple donors or surrogates at the same time. “As a doctor, you have to ask questions about their motivation,” says Briana Rudick, a doctor who oversees egg donation and surrogacy at Columbia University Fertility Center. “Is this person thinking clearly? Who is taking care of the children?”

The guidelines strongly recommend that egg donors undergo an extensive psychological evaluation that touches on a donor’s employment and finances as well as their mental health history. Experts say a proper evaluation can take anywhere from an hour to several sessions, especially if the donor and recipient know each other. One of the goals is to see if the woman is being coerced in some way.

Over the past decade, though, many US fertility clinics have outsourced or eliminated their full-time positions for psychologists and social workers. This change has coincided with the industry’s growing rollup by private equity. Today, PE-backed clinics account for about one-third of America’s IVF procedures, and doctors at these clinics make up a sizable chunk of the ASRM ethics committee.

By any ethical standard, if you promise a donor they’ll get to stay in a kid’s life, they should be able to. But a system of guidelines-not-rules leaves donors with little recourse to hold recipients to the agreed-upon terms, says Diane Tober, an anthropology professor at the University of Alabama and the author of the book Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them. “The system is ripe for abuse, because there’s no oversight,” Tober says. “I’ve seen it happen very frequently—there’s a bait and switch.”

Before the baby project, before he built his doomed insurance empire, Lindberg made his fortune in PE. Born in 1970 to a working-class family in the Bay Area, he was finishing an economics degree at Yale University when he started a newsletter about health insurance compliance. Over time, his newsletter business morphed and grew into Eli Global, an investing giant that would eventually manage about $20 billion in assets, according to a company press release. Eli bought businesses in a wide range of industries: medical coders, travel firms, a seller of sports collectibles. In 2009, Lindberg went back to work days after doctors removed a tumor from his brain, and the company continued its acquisitions apace.

Everything seemed to move faster after Lindberg acquired his first insurance company, in 2014, and made that industry a primary target. Three years later, he’d acquired a small empire’s worth of insurers. As his wealth grew (at one point, a consulting firm pegged it as high as about $1.5 billion), he started making big donations to a range of political candidates in Florida and his home state of North Carolina. He bought a yacht and began flying private. He and his wife, Tisha, settled into a plantation-style mansion in Durham with their kids. Lindberg became a believer in IVF in 2012, when they used it to have their third.

“She was an absolutely perfect child,” he recalled during one of our interviews this spring. “It just got me thinking, it’s a very interesting way to have children.”

Five years after the girl’s birth, the Lindbergs’ marriage was disintegrating. He accused Tisha of cheating, according to former Lindberg employees and girlfriends. In a 2018 legal complaint Tisha filed against him, she alleges that he’d had her involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution (which quickly released her) and got a restraining order to remove her from their home and separate her from their kids. (In the end, she got custody of all three.) Around this time, Lindberg started planning a less traditional family. “I really wanted to have a child that, ultimately, I couldn’t lose in a custody battle,” he recalled.

Soon, Lindberg began his baby project. He put his executive assistant, Brenda Lynch, in charge of coordinating with clinics, making appointments and payments. “I didn’t have to learn anything about fertility,” he said. “Brenda managed everything.” In one of the three books he’s self-published over the past several years, he details “extensive background checks and surveillance on potential donors.” Another of his assistants, Stefanie Bullock, agreed to be the first surrogate during this period, and later carried one of Lindberg’s children to term. Two former employees say that in the early stages, the idea was to have four surrogates pregnant concurrently. Neither Bullock nor Lynch responded to requests for comment for this story.

Lindberg focused on spending time with potential egg donors. “I wanted to meet these folks in person, at least take them to dinner, get to know them,” he said in one interview. Several women who dated him at the time, including four who donated their eggs, say he wowed them in one-on-one encounters organized through high-net-worth matchmaking services, or during boozy, Bachelor-esque parties on his yacht, the Double Down. Almost all these women were models with blonde hair and blue or green eyes, all of whom say Lindberg eventually told them he wanted to have kids with them because of their looks. YouTube videos of the yacht parties support their consensus that the guy had a type.

While on a second date with a Los Angeles model in early 2018, Lindberg made a bold proposition. “He said he had scouted me and wanted to have children with my genetics,” she recalls. “I was freaked out.” But he promised her $1.5 million if she went through with an egg donation, so she took a call he arranged with doctors at the Duke Fertility Center. When asked how much she expected to be paid, she told the truth. Lindberg also told the doctors about the $1.5 million and said his assistant would be the surrogate. The model says both she and Duke ultimately said no. Two former Lindberg employees confirm this.

Julia Woodward, a clinical psychologist at the Duke Fertility Center, acknowledges that she met with Lindberg but won’t comment on his case. “Decisions to defer or deny a patient for fertility care are weighty and difficult,” she says. “We are balancing access, equity and patient autonomy with the need to address ethically unacceptable issues, like coercion or the inability to parent.”

After his rejection at Duke, Lindberg began hiding details of his deals with women from other clinics, according to multiple former employees and donors. Bullock, the assistant-slash-surrogate, continued to work for Lindberg but disappeared from the official payroll, these people say. By the end of summer 2018, Lindberg had persuaded at least four of his girlfriends to lie to doctors and donate their eggs, according to the employees, some of the donors and contracts reviewed. Three of the women went in for their egg retrievals that August, including Anya—two of them at the same clinic within days. The contracts show that they signed away their rights to the eggs and any future children. Some of the donors say Lindberg had selected and paid the attorneys who’d advised them.

Interviews and messages Lindberg sent at the time corroborate that he was promising these women they’d wind up with him and that the women didn’t know about one another. “The clinic should have told me,” one of them says. “I was vulnerable, and the whole thing made me feel violated.”

More than a dozen experts in the fertility industry say these arrangements were extremely coercive. All of them called out the scale of the payments, in particular. “I have never heard of those kinds of numbers in this field,” says Columbia’s Rudick. To be fair, the clinics might not have been aware of the problematic millions based on the forms a given donor filled out. But the experts say bringing multiple donors and surrogates to the same clinic should have set off alarms. (Lindberg was open with doctors about wanting to have several surrogates carrying embryos to term at the same time, according to clinic workers and his former employees.) Along with the difficulty of parenting multiple infants, industry guidelines discourage this practice because it could encourage people to treat donors and surrogates as commodities. “I don’t know a single psychiatrist or doctor that would condone that,” Rudick says.

Yet documents show that a series of other doctors said yes. Lindberg sent egg donors to clinics in California, Illinois and Nevada, as well as Barbados. The vast majority of his donors and surrogates—at least 19—received treatment at one of two clinics: an HRC Fertility location in Los Angeles and the clinic Anya visited in Chicago, which is now part of a chain called Kindbody. Clinicians screened the donors, supplied meds, extracted eggs, transferred embryos into surrogates and stored leftover embryos for Lindberg’s possible future use.

Kindbody said in a statement that it’s “our policy to follow all legal and clinical guidelines in supporting those looking to build their families with donors and gestational carriers.” The company declined to comment on individual patients’ cases, citing privacy rights. But it also said it plans to retain an outside law firm to conduct an independent investigation into the details of this story, and noted that it didn’t acquire the Chicago clinic until years after the first stages of Lindberg’s baby project. HRC didn’t respond to requests for comment.

As his baby project gathered momentum, Lindberg was facing serious legal peril with his businesses. According to the federal fraud charges to which Lindberg recently pleaded guilty, from 2016 through 2019 he and his colleagues defrauded his insurance companies and thousands of policyholders of $2 billion, in part to finance his lifestyle. The FBI had also been building a separate case against him. Around the time Lindberg started the baby project, North Carolina’s insurance commissioner, Republican Mike Causey, began working with the feds to prove Lindberg had been trying to bribe him to sideline or replace one of his deputies. Lindberg committed $1.5 million to pro-Causey political groups. In early 2019 he was indicted on charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud. He was arrested soon after.

The arrest shocked several of Lindberg’s then girlfriends, who say he rarely discussed business. But the baby project carried on. While Lindberg was out on bond, he persuaded a Danish model visiting New York to donate her eggs, according to interviews and documents. Even after he was convicted and began serving time in federal prison in 2020, he was able to make his family much bigger. By then, his future fiancée was helping him manage it, a woman named Olivia Molina.

Molina has gone by aliases including Emma London and Molly, according to women who’ve met her under those names. She claims to be a descendant of José Domingo Molina Gómez, the Argentine revolutionary turned junta leader. She’s said on Instagram that she’s the chief executive officer of three companies, which have little record online. She’s graced the international editions of magazines, such as L’Officiel India and Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam. According to the latter piece, she’s tried acting, modeling, fashion styling, makeup and bartending. After Lindberg went to prison in 2020, he put Molina in charge of hunting for egg donors while Lynch, Bullock and several other members of Lindberg’s personal staff continued helping organize payments and appointments.

A recent filing by Lindberg’s lawyers refers to her as his fiancée. In his interviews, Lindberg said he’d met her in New York through a friend a little while before his arrest. He said that they share custody of five children and that he was paying for “whatever she needs”—rent, child care, cosmetic dentistry. Her prolific Instagram posts, which sometimes showcase her large collection of Hermès bags, include lots of photos of the kids at a Disney theme park, or riding a horse, or aboard a private jet. In a recent photo featuring her with Lindberg and seven young children, the caption reads, “Don’t worry Im fine ! They are c-section babies”

At one point in his interviews, Lindberg said, unprompted, of his partnership with Molina, who has brown hair and brown eyes, “Diversity is important in the gene pool.” He didn’t mention that she’s frequently reached out to women on Instagram to ask if they were interested in selling their eggs for at least six figures. Her contacts there aren’t a diverse pool—the overwhelming majority of accounts she follows on Instagram, hundreds of them, are blonde models with blue or green eyes. We interviewed seven women she solicited, four of whom donated eggs. In some of the messages reviewed, Molina says she’s looking for blonde donors with blue or green eyes for her “clients” who “can’t have kids.” She tells at least two candidates she’s working on commission.

In an email, Molina says that Lindberg preferred blue eyes because they were rare and that he didn’t care about hair color. She says she never accepted the commissions she was owed but stresses that she earned them. “Looking for the donors it’s a job,” she wrote. “Agencies charge for that so why not me.”

Two of the egg donors recruited by Molina on Instagram never heard Lindberg’s name or the word “prison,” including the model who says she agreed to donate because she thought it was for a family who couldn’t have kids. Another donor, also a model, says the full story would’ve made her reconsider.

While Lindberg was in prison, the baby project grew more complicated to finance. Even as he worked from prison to keep his businesses afloat, he directed staffers to spend whatever it took to make more babies. Financial and medical records and emails show the Chicago clinic now owned by Kindbody was treating three of his surrogates at the time. “How are we going to pay for the nannies, etc for these babies when they get here?” one Lindberg employee asked another in a message.

“Exactly,” the other employee replied. “I mean doesn’t he see we are broke?”

Several egg donors and at least one surrogate never received the full payments they were promised, according to interviews, contracts and financial records. More devastating for some of the women was Lindberg’s control of their relationships with the kids. Early in 2021 he abruptly severed contact with Anya and cut her out of Oliver’s life. “It’s time for her to stop spending time with [him],” Lindberg wrote to Molina from prison. “She is taking it for granted. She is an egg donor and I do not ‘share’ a child with her.”

Molina forwarded the messages to Anya. “You pushed away yourself by being stupid enough to sell your eggs and believe he was going to want a relationship with you,” she added. “He doesn’t respect egg donors.”

While in prison, Lindberg also began to disclose the full sums he was offering egg donors in contracts that were reviewed by fertility clinics. Three of the women who donated eggs via HRC say the clinic was aware that the payments went well beyond the normal range of fees, but never questioned them. (At this time, the payments ranged from $75,000 to $100,000.) One recalls the clinical coordinator coaching her on answers for intake forms. This donor says that when she gave honest answers to questions about things like drug use and tattoos, the coordinator said that she would ask the questions again and wanted different answers. The coordinator didn’t respond to inquiries.

By this time, one donor had complained to the Chicago clinic that she felt Lindberg had duped and exploited her. The donor says she detailed the coercion and emotional abuse she’d experienced on a call with Angeline Beltsos, the doctor who ran the clinic. She remembers Beltsos telling her to watch YouTube meditation videos and relax. Beltsos, who’s now Kindbody’s chief executive physician, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Some of the donors, as well as former Kindbody employees, say the Chicago clinic repeatedly violated their trust to give Lindberg what he wanted. Donor screening, including the psych eval and FDA-mandated testing, typically takes roughly two to three months, but the Chicago clinic screened some of Lindberg’s donors in a matter of weeks. “Many of them didn’t know what they were getting themselves into,” says a former clinic employee. “They were being pushed through the process. It left them really confused.” The donor who called Beltsos in 2020 says her experience was “traumatizing” and recalls confiding to nurses during an appointment that Lindberg had told her he wanted 12 blond-haired, blue-eyed boys. She says she expected them to be as troubled by the statement as she was, but that they brushed her off and joked about going on Lindberg’s yacht.

“Kindbody takes patient safety and medical ethics extremely seriously, which is why we have both a Medical Advisory Committee and a Medical Ethics Committee, each composed of a number of senior reproductive endocrinologists, to ensure that we follow best practices and industry guidelines,” the company said in its statement.

But the clinicians had incentives to ignore their professional guidelines, according to interviews and financial records. Workers at Kindbody’s Chicago clinic, which has treated nine Lindberg surrogates since 2018, including five who carried to term, say the company saw Lindberg’s baby project as a steady stream of easy money. He paid well above the norm for each treatment package, records show—roughly $50,000, and out of pocket. “It was a well-oiled machine,” says one staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Records also show that the Chicago clinic and HRC, which made at least $120,000 from Lindberg between 2020 and 2022, knew about each other, frequently shipping eggs and embryos between clinics for an extra fee. Kindbody is still storing Lindberg’s specimens for future use, financial records show.

Three more babies were born while Lindberg was in prison, two of them through the clinic in Chicago. Documents show that during this period Lindberg e-signed egg donor and surrogate contracts listing him as the sole intended parent. In the event of his death, at least one of the contracts states, two of his assistants would take custody.

Five more Lindberg kids have been born since his July 2022 release from prison, starting with one born the following month. Witnesses have seen documents showing that he and his team were working with a dozen women as egg donors, surrogates, or both in 2022 and early 2023.

Then, abruptly, Lindberg changed course. In an email sent a week before his federal fraud indictment that February, he told his personal staff, “We are stopping the baby project for a few years.” Embryo transfers would be paused, he said, and surrogates-in-waiting would be dismissed. “I am grateful for all your work here,” he wrote. “It’s now time to raise these children.” In her email, Molina says the pause was her idea. “I told him I was tired and exhausted and we already had too many babies,” she says. “He agreed.”

The past year of Lindberg’s life has involved a lot of shuttling between his Tampa-area home and courtrooms in North Carolina. According to court filings, he has more than $27 million in federal tax obligations and owes hundreds of millions more in judgments from lawsuits related to various insurance companies. In May he was reconvicted in the bribery case and is awaiting sentencing in that case as well as in the fraud case in which he pleaded guilty.

Lindberg arrived at a sit-down interview at a JW Marriott conference room in Tampa in June wearing a black suit that covered the ankle monitor strapped to his leg. He started off with intense eye contact and firm handshakes, and handed out copies of his three self-published books. The first, Failing Early & Failing Often, came out the same month he checked into prison in 2020, and the second, 633 Days Inside, was published two months after he left prison in 2022. In both books he blames his legal troubles on the state insurance commissioner who helped the FBI gather evidence against him. In the first he speaks up for “the persecuted class” of billionaires, whom he also refers to as “the ‘Socrates’ of our generation.”

During the interview, Lindberg maintained his innocence. “I’m in this mess because I wasn’t a good enough student,” he said. “I was naive about politics. I had no idea these politicians could be so evil.”

He said he wasn’t worried about his upcoming sentencing and that he was focused on his new wellness-education company, Lifelong Labs. He hadn’t eaten for almost 90 hours, part of a weekly fast that he claimed was making him younger. “I’ve got the body of a 20-year-old, but I have the wisdom and maturity of a 53-year-old,” said Lindberg, who turned 54 in July. He said he collects photos of gray hairs that have fallen out since he started his fasting program.

The longevity kick and the baby project echo the obsessions of other wealthy peers—the anti-aging efforts of Larry Ellison or Bryan Johnson, the compound full of offspring motivated by Elon Musk’s overblown fears of population collapse. Lindberg said his baby project is meant in part to help “preserve who we are as a civilization, as a species.”

For now, Lindberg’s public legacy is one of the largest individual fraud cases in American history. After his $2 billion fraud plea in November, he was taken into custody. In a legal filing that month, a Lindberg attorney requested that he be moved to a halfway house instead of jail, in part because his eight children in Florida needed their father. (Molina says her relatives are looking after the kids in Tampa, because she’s in Spain, where it would be “too expensive” to take care of them.) An earlier filing shows that a family court judge recently ordered Lindberg to pay his ex-wife $300,000 in missed child support payments. Lindberg’s lawyer says the number was negotiated down to $175,000, which has now been paid in full.

Lindberg’s legacy to the fertility industry, thus far at least, might be to convey to any wealthy person that they can get away with executing their own version of the baby project. Without the attendant financial crimes, it would be much easier to conceal. The industry remains more or less on the honor system. Even if ASRM, the trade group, chose to expel the doctors who worked with Lindberg from its ranks, the doctors could keep practicing and their clinics could continue to operate.

And the chances of those clinicians running afoul of ASRM seem low. For one thing, the field is still a small one by the standards of the medical profession, and its size breeds coziness. ASRM CEO Jared Robins was previously a doctor at the Chicago clinic, run by Beltsos, that treated almost a dozen of Lindberg’s egg donors and surrogates, including while Robins worked there. A few months after Robins’ appointment as the head of ASRM in 2022—and shortly after Kindbody acquired the Chicago clinic—Robins, Beltsos and other Kindbody executives rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange together.

In the months that followed, Kindbody transferred at least two more embryos into surrogates for Lindberg. In late 2023, the donor who’d complained to Beltsos years earlier about feeling duped and exploited by Lindberg sent a fresh letter to Kindbody executives, including CEO Gina Bartasi, calling the clinic’s behavior unethical, a copy of the letter shows. Bartasi didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did Robins or ASRM.

Beyond the specter of fertility fraud, some clinics have been known to mishandle embryos and even lose them to all manner of accidents and incompetence, including instances at Kindbody locations where embryos were mislabeled, dropped or left out at room temperature, a 2023 investigation found. In a statement at the time, the company acknowledged these issues but said “no Kindbody laboratory has had an incident, accident or other issue that is unusual to what occurs in IVF laboratories generally.”

Cases such as these, as well as Lindberg’s, come at a delicate moment for America’s fertility industry. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, unraveling the federal right to abortion, Republicans have introduced a wave of “fetal personhood” bills in state legislatures around the country, seeking to give fetuses and sometimes embryos legal rights. In February the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are “unborn children,” siding with couples who sued an IVF clinic after some of their embryos were accidentally destroyed. An overwhelming share of Americans support access to IVF, and President-elect Donald Trump aligned himself with access on the campaign trail, at one point declaring himself “the father of IVF” while promising to guarantee insurance coverage for the treatment. But Senate Republicans have twice blocked a Democratic bill this year that would provide a nationwide right to IVF treatments, and Trump’s vice president-to-be, JD Vance, has voted against expanding access to them as a senator from Ohio.

More than two dozen ASRM members interviewed, including doctors, embryologists and psychologists, agree the industry needs reform. The University of Alabama’s Tober suggests that intended parents be required to undergo background checks. Rijon Charne, a fertility lawyer with Sunray Fertility, says all parties should be required to have independent legal counsel. (Neither are ASRM members.) Still, many industry figures also warn that any external regulation, no matter how well-intentioned, could reduce access to IVF and related treatment.

“It’s a really, really difficult conundrum,” says Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the University of Virginia who’s written extensively about reproductive rights, including in her 2009 book, Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulation. “The US has a complicated history with reproductive rights.” Cahn points to the UK, where a purpose-built government agency oversees fertility clinics, as a model for reform. Still, she says, reformers can bet there will be unintended consequences.

Asked this spring what he’d say to anyone objecting to his approach to IVF and the industry, Lindberg replied, “Everyone gets criticized who lives in a novel way.”

Assuming he’s going back to prison, Lindberg says he’s not sure what he’ll do with his many young children. One option is to move them somewhere nearby and rely on nannies to look after them. That was how he handled things during his previous incarceration, in Alabama. He expects the kids to play in the prison yard during visiting hours. “Daddy’s sitting there wearing a prison uniform, but they get to see their father. It’s not ideal, but it’s probably just about as much as a lot of busy professionals get to see their kids,” he said.

Lindberg said he still has “a ton” of embryos stored in clinics, from multiple egg donors. Asked whether he plans to use them, he first said 12 kids is enough but quickly changed his mind. “If I have the resources and the time and the youth, I feel somewhat obligated to see,” he said. “Morally obligated to see if there’s humans in those embryos.”