September 27, 2025 • 44 mins
A Kindbody employee discovers the company is helping an imprisoned billionaire father multiple children through surrogates and egg donors. In this episode, reporter Jackie Davalos investigates Greg Lindberg's "baby project" and what it illustrates about America's unregulated fertility industry.
Read more: IVF Disrupted: The Kindbody Story
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
So I read this in the office and my jaw
hit the floor because I was like, what do you mean.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
What do you actually mean? We're doing this?
Speaker 5 (01:22):
Kendall couldn't hide her disbelief. Her coworker immediately.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
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
(01:48):
I supposed to do with this?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
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
(02:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
The woman then references a phone call she says she
made to doctor Beltzo's back in twenty twenty, I called you.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
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.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
The letter goes on to say.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
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
(04:02):
doctor Baltzos as the designated medical provider and Lindbergh as
the sole intended parent. In February of twenty twenty two,
Kind Body bought Bios and the clinic continued to play
a crucial role in Lindberg's baby project. Out of the
six additional children Lindberg went on to have since that time,
(04:22):
three of them were born through surrogates treated at Kind Body.
The letter continues with the woman saying she and other
egg donors are concerned that Lindberg is lying to them
about what is happening with their eggs.
Speaker 5 (04:35):
The woman says he.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
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.
Speaker 5 (04:58):
Sincerely, the patient.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
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
(05:27):
to IVF disrupted the kind Body story. I'm your host,
Jackie Devalos.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
You've heard how.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
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
(05:59):
to a group of employees that they would make so
much money they'd each have their own private jets. But
the move fast and break things mentality is a dangerous
game when you're talking about IVF and women's bodies, their embryos,
and their hopes of creating a family are all on
the line. In the previous episode, we heard from women
(06:22):
who felt kind Body push them into procedures they didn't need.
Now we'll hear about kind Body burning through cash and
taking on patients that other clinics were hesitant to treat.
We'll be right back. Let's get back to Kendall. She's
the kind Body employee who was working the front desk
(06:44):
in a Chicago clinic. She was holding this letter that
was sounding the alarm on a billionaire, Greg Lindbergh and
what he called, quote the baby Project. She had never
met this woman who wrote the letter and had never
seen Lindberg in person, but Kendall does remember when lind
Berg's name first came on her radar.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:26):
And I was like, Dad is so weird, Kendall said.
Some things were off.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Lind Berg's assistant coordinated appointments for egg donors and surrogates.
Speaker 5 (07:41):
This was widely known at the clinic.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
She remembered one day when one of linn Berg's surrogates
checked in for an appointment.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
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.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
This wasn't how it usually worked.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
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.
(08:57):
Over the past several years, he's been convicted in federal
court twice for bribery, and he pleaded guilty in a
third case in November of twenty twenty four for money
laundering and fraud. These charges stem from a two billion
dollar scheme to funnel money from his insurance companies to
use for his personal benefit. Right now, he's facing as
(09:19):
much as thirty years in prison. By contrast, Lindbergh's baby
project didn't seem to break any laws. He made a
plan to have as many as fifty children through a
web of egg donors and surrogates.
Speaker 5 (09:34):
I pieced this.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
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,
and surrogates. Lindberg sent egg donors to clinics in California, Illinois, Nevada,
(09:57):
and Barbados, but the majority of his owns and surrogates
at least eleven received treatment at the clinic in Chicago
that was run by Bios, and then kind Body, a
clinic in Los Angeles not related to kind Body, also
did a lot of fertility procedures on Lindberg's behalf. I
(10:17):
wrote about this baby project in a story with my
colleague Sophia Alexander that was published last year in Bloomberg
Business Week. Lindberg participated in interviews for the article, but
in the months leading up to publication, he cut off
contact and filed a lawsuit against me and Sophie in
state court in Florida, alleging defamation, slander, and interference in
(10:38):
his business relationships. After the article actually ran, he sued
us again, this time in Florida Federal court, making more
or less the same allegations. In May, he asked the
state court to dismiss that case, saying it was largely
duplicative of the federal case, and then in August, the
federal court dismissed all of his claims against Bloomberg and
(10:59):
me and Sofia. I should also know I reached out
to Lindbergh again while preparing the series and told him
what I was planning to report about him, and he
didn't respond back at kind body. Kendall was stunned by
the egg donor's letter, so she took this problem to
her superiors.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
Were you expecting what kind of reaction? Were you expecting
shock and awe?
Speaker 3 (11:38):
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
(12:00):
not give it to doctor Beltzos, and so I was like,
what can be done.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
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
(12:26):
to doctor Beltzo's last year before my investigation was published,
and again for this podcast. She has not responded to
any requests for comment. The woman also told me that
the letter she sent in October of twenty twenty three,
the one Kendall saw, was also sent to other leaders
at kind Body, including Gena Bartesi.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
No one replied to her.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
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
(13:09):
embarked on this quest in twenty eighteen, he went to
Duke Fertility Center. Lindberg was upfront about what he was doing.
Speaker 5 (13:17):
He wanted to.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
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.
Speaker 5 (13:36):
Refused to treat him.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
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
(14:00):
requires fertility clinics to collect a donor's medical history and
test for infectious diseases. The rest is left up to
the American Society for Reproductive Medicine or ASRM. It's an
industry group for fertility clinics. They craft guidelines on what
to do or not to do for themselves, so essentially
(14:21):
they're self policing, and these are just guidelines, suggestions, really
not hard and fast rules. For example, they strongly recommend
that the egg donor undergoes an extensive psychological evaluation, which
probes into everything from work history, financial stability, and a
history of mental illness. Experts say a proper evaluation can
(14:45):
take anywhere from an hour to several sessions, and it
should take longer if the donor knows who she's donating
to One of the goals is to see if she's
being pressured into donating. Doctor julianne's Wifle is a psychologist
specializing in reproductive health at the University of Wisconsin. I
met her last year at the fertility industry's biggest annuel gathering.
(15:08):
Doctor's Swifele served on the ethics committee at ASRM for
six years, so she's seen her fair share of complicated cases.
She said that when she counsels her patients, she's trying
to gauge whether the woman donating her eggs is making
a well informed decision.
Speaker 6 (15:23):
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.
Speaker 7 (15:34):
But are you?
Speaker 6 (15:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
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
(16:04):
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
also raised concerns. She stressed that a doctor's responsibility is
to all of the patients, the donor and the surrogate
and the intended parent, not just the one paying the
(16:26):
clinic fees. A surrogate's needs need to be carefully considered too,
because the process of carrying someone else's child isn't just
physically taxing. It can also be emotionally complicated. If you
have multiple donors and multiple surrogates at the same time,
there might be a tendency to treat them like things.
Speaker 6 (16:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
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.
Speaker 6 (17:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
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.
Speaker 7 (17:43):
When it comes to third party reproduction, we're in a
really weird, sticky place.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
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.
Speaker 7 (17:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
And yet, even to doctor Levine, Greg Lindberg stood out.
Speaker 7 (18:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
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.
Speaker 7 (18:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
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,
(19:25):
calling it quote the biggest danger civilization faces. Then there's Paveldurov,
the founder of Telegram, who said in a June interview
that he has fathered over a hundred children by donating sperm.
As long as the IVF industry remains largely unregulated, there's
little to stop the next billionaire with the baby project
(19:45):
from finding a willing clinic to help. Doctor Levine says
Greg Linberg's baby project at kind Body pointed to institutional failure.
Speaker 7 (19:56):
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
(20:19):
culture that occurred within that clinic. And I would worry
about the other outcomes that have happened there as well
that aren't being reported to you.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
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.
Speaker 5 (20:40):
A patient too.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
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
(21:19):
and what she had to go through.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
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,
(22:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
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
(23:07):
do think a lot of times morals were thrown out,
and just the price tag was what was making the
doctors keep going. I do have people in my life
that were looking into fertility.
Speaker 5 (23:17):
I said, do not go to kind Body.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
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
(23:43):
in a full financial crisis. They'd burn through investor money
and they'd failed to secure another funding round. The company
that was once valued at one point eight billion dollars
was running on fumes. Gina Bartesi hadn't been CEO for
two years. In June of twenty twenty four, she took
over the job again. The company built it as a
(24:05):
move to steer kind Body during a time of unprecedented growth,
but that same summer, kind Body abruptly started closing clinics.
One of the first to close was in Crest Hill, Illinois,
not far from where Kendall worked in Chicago.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
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.
Speaker 8 (24:37):
What do you mean?
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Patients were losing their minds and we were just told, oh,
handel it as best you can.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
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
(25:25):
get the best.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Care, and I was like, girl, this is not the
best care right now.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
And because they did that, we we had to absorb
so many patients in the Chicago offices.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Then the Detroit clinic closed.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
After all of this, Kendall hit her breaking point, and.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
So I was like, I'm like officially done with this
company because the only thing you all are interested in
is money.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
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
(26:30):
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
independent review of the allegations. A week later, Kind Body
announced that Gina Bartesy was stepping down from her second
turn as CEO. When I first heard about the news,
(26:54):
I texted Gina and she told me quote it had
been planned for months. Former execusatives and people familiar with
discussions that kind Body's board were having at this time
told me Gina had actually been asked to step down.
Two months after that, in February of twenty twenty five,
doctor Angie Beltzos, who treated Lindbergh, stepped down from her
(27:15):
role as chief physician. When I asked Gina and kind
Body about my reporting, representatives pointed out she was instrumental
in building a company that has expanded access to reproductive
health care. Kind Bodies said partnerships with Walmart, for example,
have expanded access in rural fertility deserts, and that nearly
ten thousand families exist or have grown during Gina's tenure
(27:39):
at kind Body alone. I reached out to former kind
Body employees when I first heard that Gina was stepping down.
Here's Tracy Sosa, an early employee who worked at their
Princeton clinic.
Speaker 9 (27:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
So any are you surprised she resigned?
Speaker 9 (28:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
When you posted that story about the millionaire, I sent
it to my family.
Speaker 9 (28:34):
I was like, literally like has no bottom, Like I'm
seething when I I can't believe it?
Speaker 10 (28:43):
Do you?
Speaker 9 (28:44):
How do you go that far and then continue to
go and double down?
Speaker 7 (28:50):
Now? Where are all those kids?
Speaker 9 (28:52):
Honestly, where are all those babies?
Speaker 5 (28:54):
And who has them?
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Are their mothers?
Speaker 6 (28:57):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (28:58):
But as long as the clinic's taking money though, you
see what I'm saying, Like, that's crazy, it's scary.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
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
(29:26):
new clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina, after years of trying
to get it off the ground, but plans in other cities,
including Miami and Philadelphia, haven't yielded anything. Several of its
top doctors and lab directors have resigned or been laid off.
The chief financial officer, who had been serving as co
CEO after Gina's departure, left the company in the spring,
(29:49):
along with the chief technology officer. For the employees who
believed in kind Body's original mission, watching its decline has
been difficult, they joined a company that promised to transform
women's healthcare, to treat patients holistically, to make fertility care
feel less clinical and more human. They feel disillusioned.
Speaker 9 (30:11):
Don't get me into there on this cheerleading Pom pom
women empowerment.
Speaker 5 (30:16):
It's going to be a great esthetic.
Speaker 9 (30:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Dozens of former employees told me kind Body had a
culture of fear and intimidation that made it difficult to
speak out.
Speaker 5 (30:37):
I found out about.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
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,
(30:59):
former employe like Tracy told me they felt like their
careers were tainted by having kind Body on the resume.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
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
(31:28):
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
patient medically. They had the nutrition, the holistic like I said,
so they really hit something there.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
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,
(32:06):
he's a business guy. Employees I spoke to, past and
current have high hopes that David will turn the company around.
We wanted to hear about his plans for kind Body
and invited him for an interview, but he declined.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
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?
How did an industry that creates life, that fulfills people's
(32:54):
deepest dreams of having children become a place where embryos
get mislabeled, where billionaires can essentially buy babies, and where
patients feel like they're being upsold rather than cared for.
The answer lies in a fundamental tension at the heart
of American fertility care. On the one side, you have
(33:14):
the miracle of modern medicine, the ability to help people
have children who otherwise couldn't. On the other side, you
have an industry that operates with virtually no oversight for
market forces reign supreme, where patients often have no way
to distinguish between good clinics and bad ones. This lack
(33:36):
of transparency affects everyone who walks through a fertility clinics doors.
Patients are essentially flying blind. I spoke to Adam Wolf
about this lack of transparency. He's a lawyer who specializes
in fertility litigation.
Speaker 4 (33:51):
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
(34:11):
because that embryo belonged to another couple, how do we
know about that. It's because the child is of a
different race than the couple. So how many times has
that happened, but we're unaware of it because the child
is of the race that the couple expected.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
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.
Speaker 5 (34:41):
The reason we don't.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
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,
(35:04):
when patients do discover mistakes and hire lawyers like Adam,
those cases rarely see the inside of a courtroom. They're
settled quietly with non disclosure agreements that ensure that details
never become public. The clinic writes a check, the patient
signs away their right to speak about what happened, and
the error effectively disappears. No other patients will ever know,
(35:28):
no regulator will investigate. The clinic can keep advertising its
success rates as if nothing ever went wrong.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
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,
(36:01):
clothes on the ground, it can be dirty, and you
go from the four seasons lobby to the back of
a restaurant.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
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
(36:31):
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
the fertility industry up in abortion politics. They are afraid
of getting regulated out of existence.
Speaker 5 (36:51):
Since Roe v.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
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
(37:14):
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.
Speaker 10 (37:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
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
(38:09):
treatment it was too risky. This ruling changed the political landscape. Overnight,
politicians who'd never mentioned fertility treatment suddenly had to take positions.
This newfound political attention came with consequences. Anti abortion groups
turned their attention to IVF, flooding Capitol Hill with policy proposals.
Speaker 10 (38:33):
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
(38:56):
even improving the outcomes.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
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
(39:22):
been reporting on in this series. What do we do
about the embryos that are lost, mislabeled, or accidentally destroyed,
or about women who feel pushed into unnecessary procedures, or
about something like Lindbergh's baby project. Is there a way
to introduce some protections for a patient who walks through
(39:42):
the door.
Speaker 10 (39:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
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.
Speaker 8 (40:17):
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.
(40:40):
There are no incentives to do it. If they spend
money to upgrade, they are losing money, so there is
financial disincentive and patients don't know, so they are asking
about it and making decisions about it.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
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
(41:16):
between access and safety standards in IBF for other families.
Speaker 8 (41:21):
Women want reproductor of autonomy and investors want growth, but
then there are sometimes when it's misaligned.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
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.
Speaker 8 (41:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
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
(42:17):
than four hundred thousand cycles performed annually, and that number
is expected to keep climbing. Meanwhile, private equity and venture
capital firms continue to pour money into the fertility sector.
Industry reports show that fertility startups raised over eight hundred
million dollars in funding in twenty twenty three alone, with
(42:39):
major chains being consolidated under private equity ownership. Today, more
than forty percent of IVF cycles in the United States
are performed at a clinic owned by private equity, and
that percentage keeps growing and for the time being, there
are no guardrails on the fertility industry. IVF Disrupted The
(43:07):
Kind Body Story is reported and hosted by me Jackie Devalos.
The series is produced by Sean Wen and Jilda Decarly,
editing by Caitlin Kenney, Jeff Grocott, and Joshua Brustein. Blake
Maples is our sound engineer and composer, fact checking by
Anaga Robbins. Bloomberg Senior Executive Editor for Technology is Tom Giles.
(43:31):
Our head of podcasting is Sage Bauman. You can reach
us at podcasts at Bloomberg dot net. IVF Disrupted is
a production of Bloomberg and iHeart Podcasts.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
So I read this in the office and my jaw
hit the floor because I was like, what do you mean.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
What do you actually mean? We're doing this?
Speaker 5 (01:22):
Kendall couldn't hide her disbelief. Her coworker immediately.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
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
(01:48):
I supposed to do with this?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
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
(02:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
The woman then references a phone call she says she
made to doctor Beltzo's back in twenty twenty, I called you.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
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.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
The letter goes on to say.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
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
(04:02):
doctor Baltzos as the designated medical provider and Lindbergh as
the sole intended parent. In February of twenty twenty two,
Kind Body bought Bios and the clinic continued to play
a crucial role in Lindberg's baby project. Out of the
six additional children Lindberg went on to have since that time,
(04:22):
three of them were born through surrogates treated at Kind Body.
The letter continues with the woman saying she and other
egg donors are concerned that Lindberg is lying to them
about what is happening with their eggs.
Speaker 5 (04:35):
The woman says he.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
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.
Speaker 5 (04:58):
Sincerely, the patient.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
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
(05:27):
to IVF disrupted the kind Body story. I'm your host,
Jackie Devalos.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
You've heard how.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
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
(05:59):
to a group of employees that they would make so
much money they'd each have their own private jets. But
the move fast and break things mentality is a dangerous
game when you're talking about IVF and women's bodies, their embryos,
and their hopes of creating a family are all on
the line. In the previous episode, we heard from women
(06:22):
who felt kind Body push them into procedures they didn't need.
Now we'll hear about kind Body burning through cash and
taking on patients that other clinics were hesitant to treat.
We'll be right back. Let's get back to Kendall. She's
the kind Body employee who was working the front desk
(06:44):
in a Chicago clinic. She was holding this letter that
was sounding the alarm on a billionaire, Greg Lindbergh and
what he called, quote the baby Project. She had never
met this woman who wrote the letter and had never
seen Lindberg in person, but Kendall does remember when lind
Berg's name first came on her radar.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:26):
And I was like, Dad is so weird, Kendall said.
Some things were off.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Lind Berg's assistant coordinated appointments for egg donors and surrogates.
Speaker 5 (07:41):
This was widely known at the clinic.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
She remembered one day when one of linn Berg's surrogates
checked in for an appointment.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
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.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
This wasn't how it usually worked.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
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.
(08:57):
Over the past several years, he's been convicted in federal
court twice for bribery, and he pleaded guilty in a
third case in November of twenty twenty four for money
laundering and fraud. These charges stem from a two billion
dollar scheme to funnel money from his insurance companies to
use for his personal benefit. Right now, he's facing as
(09:19):
much as thirty years in prison. By contrast, Lindbergh's baby
project didn't seem to break any laws. He made a
plan to have as many as fifty children through a
web of egg donors and surrogates.
Speaker 5 (09:34):
I pieced this.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
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,
and surrogates. Lindberg sent egg donors to clinics in California, Illinois, Nevada,
(09:57):
and Barbados, but the majority of his owns and surrogates
at least eleven received treatment at the clinic in Chicago
that was run by Bios, and then kind Body, a
clinic in Los Angeles not related to kind Body, also
did a lot of fertility procedures on Lindberg's behalf. I
(10:17):
wrote about this baby project in a story with my
colleague Sophia Alexander that was published last year in Bloomberg
Business Week. Lindberg participated in interviews for the article, but
in the months leading up to publication, he cut off
contact and filed a lawsuit against me and Sophie in
state court in Florida, alleging defamation, slander, and interference in
(10:38):
his business relationships. After the article actually ran, he sued
us again, this time in Florida Federal court, making more
or less the same allegations. In May, he asked the
state court to dismiss that case, saying it was largely
duplicative of the federal case, and then in August, the
federal court dismissed all of his claims against Bloomberg and
(10:59):
me and Sofia. I should also know I reached out
to Lindbergh again while preparing the series and told him
what I was planning to report about him, and he
didn't respond back at kind body. Kendall was stunned by
the egg donor's letter, so she took this problem to
her superiors.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
Were you expecting what kind of reaction? Were you expecting
shock and awe?
Speaker 3 (11:38):
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
(12:00):
not give it to doctor Beltzos, and so I was like,
what can be done.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
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
(12:26):
to doctor Beltzo's last year before my investigation was published,
and again for this podcast. She has not responded to
any requests for comment. The woman also told me that
the letter she sent in October of twenty twenty three,
the one Kendall saw, was also sent to other leaders
at kind Body, including Gena Bartesi.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
No one replied to her.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
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
(13:09):
embarked on this quest in twenty eighteen, he went to
Duke Fertility Center. Lindberg was upfront about what he was doing.
Speaker 5 (13:17):
He wanted to.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
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.
Speaker 5 (13:36):
Refused to treat him.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
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
(14:00):
requires fertility clinics to collect a donor's medical history and
test for infectious diseases. The rest is left up to
the American Society for Reproductive Medicine or ASRM. It's an
industry group for fertility clinics. They craft guidelines on what
to do or not to do for themselves, so essentially
(14:21):
they're self policing, and these are just guidelines, suggestions, really
not hard and fast rules. For example, they strongly recommend
that the egg donor undergoes an extensive psychological evaluation, which
probes into everything from work history, financial stability, and a
history of mental illness. Experts say a proper evaluation can
(14:45):
take anywhere from an hour to several sessions, and it
should take longer if the donor knows who she's donating
to One of the goals is to see if she's
being pressured into donating. Doctor julianne's Wifle is a psychologist
specializing in reproductive health at the University of Wisconsin. I
met her last year at the fertility industry's biggest annuel gathering.
(15:08):
Doctor's Swifele served on the ethics committee at ASRM for
six years, so she's seen her fair share of complicated cases.
She said that when she counsels her patients, she's trying
to gauge whether the woman donating her eggs is making
a well informed decision.
Speaker 6 (15:23):
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.
Speaker 7 (15:34):
But are you?
Speaker 6 (15:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
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
(16:04):
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
also raised concerns. She stressed that a doctor's responsibility is
to all of the patients, the donor and the surrogate
and the intended parent, not just the one paying the
(16:26):
clinic fees. A surrogate's needs need to be carefully considered too,
because the process of carrying someone else's child isn't just
physically taxing. It can also be emotionally complicated. If you
have multiple donors and multiple surrogates at the same time,
there might be a tendency to treat them like things.
Speaker 6 (16:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
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.
Speaker 6 (17:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
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.
Speaker 7 (17:43):
When it comes to third party reproduction, we're in a
really weird, sticky place.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
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.
Speaker 7 (17:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
And yet, even to doctor Levine, Greg Lindberg stood out.
Speaker 7 (18:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
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.
Speaker 7 (18:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
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,
(19:25):
calling it quote the biggest danger civilization faces. Then there's Paveldurov,
the founder of Telegram, who said in a June interview
that he has fathered over a hundred children by donating sperm.
As long as the IVF industry remains largely unregulated, there's
little to stop the next billionaire with the baby project
(19:45):
from finding a willing clinic to help. Doctor Levine says
Greg Linberg's baby project at kind Body pointed to institutional failure.
Speaker 7 (19:56):
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
(20:19):
culture that occurred within that clinic. And I would worry
about the other outcomes that have happened there as well
that aren't being reported to you.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
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.
Speaker 5 (20:40):
A patient too.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
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
(21:19):
and what she had to go through.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
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,
(22:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
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
(23:07):
do think a lot of times morals were thrown out,
and just the price tag was what was making the
doctors keep going. I do have people in my life
that were looking into fertility.
Speaker 5 (23:17):
I said, do not go to kind Body.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
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
(23:43):
in a full financial crisis. They'd burn through investor money
and they'd failed to secure another funding round. The company
that was once valued at one point eight billion dollars
was running on fumes. Gina Bartesi hadn't been CEO for
two years. In June of twenty twenty four, she took
over the job again. The company built it as a
(24:05):
move to steer kind Body during a time of unprecedented growth,
but that same summer, kind Body abruptly started closing clinics.
One of the first to close was in Crest Hill, Illinois,
not far from where Kendall worked in Chicago.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
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.
Speaker 8 (24:37):
What do you mean?
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Patients were losing their minds and we were just told, oh,
handel it as best you can.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
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
(25:25):
get the best.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Care, and I was like, girl, this is not the
best care right now.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
And because they did that, we we had to absorb
so many patients in the Chicago offices.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Then the Detroit clinic closed.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
After all of this, Kendall hit her breaking point, and.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
So I was like, I'm like officially done with this
company because the only thing you all are interested in
is money.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
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
(26:30):
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
independent review of the allegations. A week later, Kind Body
announced that Gina Bartesy was stepping down from her second
turn as CEO. When I first heard about the news,
(26:54):
I texted Gina and she told me quote it had
been planned for months. Former execusatives and people familiar with
discussions that kind Body's board were having at this time
told me Gina had actually been asked to step down.
Two months after that, in February of twenty twenty five,
doctor Angie Beltzos, who treated Lindbergh, stepped down from her
(27:15):
role as chief physician. When I asked Gina and kind
Body about my reporting, representatives pointed out she was instrumental
in building a company that has expanded access to reproductive
health care. Kind Bodies said partnerships with Walmart, for example,
have expanded access in rural fertility deserts, and that nearly
ten thousand families exist or have grown during Gina's tenure
(27:39):
at kind Body alone. I reached out to former kind
Body employees when I first heard that Gina was stepping down.
Here's Tracy Sosa, an early employee who worked at their
Princeton clinic.
Speaker 9 (27:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
So any are you surprised she resigned?
Speaker 9 (28:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
When you posted that story about the millionaire, I sent
it to my family.
Speaker 9 (28:34):
I was like, literally like has no bottom, Like I'm
seething when I I can't believe it?
Speaker 10 (28:43):
Do you?
Speaker 9 (28:44):
How do you go that far and then continue to
go and double down?
Speaker 7 (28:50):
Now? Where are all those kids?
Speaker 9 (28:52):
Honestly, where are all those babies?
Speaker 5 (28:54):
And who has them?
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Are their mothers?
Speaker 6 (28:57):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (28:58):
But as long as the clinic's taking money though, you
see what I'm saying, Like, that's crazy, it's scary.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
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
(29:26):
new clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina, after years of trying
to get it off the ground, but plans in other cities,
including Miami and Philadelphia, haven't yielded anything. Several of its
top doctors and lab directors have resigned or been laid off.
The chief financial officer, who had been serving as co
CEO after Gina's departure, left the company in the spring,
(29:49):
along with the chief technology officer. For the employees who
believed in kind Body's original mission, watching its decline has
been difficult, they joined a company that promised to transform
women's healthcare, to treat patients holistically, to make fertility care
feel less clinical and more human. They feel disillusioned.
Speaker 9 (30:11):
Don't get me into there on this cheerleading Pom pom
women empowerment.
Speaker 5 (30:16):
It's going to be a great esthetic.
Speaker 9 (30:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Dozens of former employees told me kind Body had a
culture of fear and intimidation that made it difficult to
speak out.
Speaker 5 (30:37):
I found out about.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
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,
(30:59):
former employe like Tracy told me they felt like their
careers were tainted by having kind Body on the resume.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
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
(31:28):
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
patient medically. They had the nutrition, the holistic like I said,
so they really hit something there.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
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,
(32:06):
he's a business guy. Employees I spoke to, past and
current have high hopes that David will turn the company around.
We wanted to hear about his plans for kind Body
and invited him for an interview, but he declined.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
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?
How did an industry that creates life, that fulfills people's
(32:54):
deepest dreams of having children become a place where embryos
get mislabeled, where billionaires can essentially buy babies, and where
patients feel like they're being upsold rather than cared for.
The answer lies in a fundamental tension at the heart
of American fertility care. On the one side, you have
(33:14):
the miracle of modern medicine, the ability to help people
have children who otherwise couldn't. On the other side, you
have an industry that operates with virtually no oversight for
market forces reign supreme, where patients often have no way
to distinguish between good clinics and bad ones. This lack
(33:36):
of transparency affects everyone who walks through a fertility clinics doors.
Patients are essentially flying blind. I spoke to Adam Wolf
about this lack of transparency. He's a lawyer who specializes
in fertility litigation.
Speaker 4 (33:51):
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
(34:11):
because that embryo belonged to another couple, how do we
know about that. It's because the child is of a
different race than the couple. So how many times has
that happened, but we're unaware of it because the child
is of the race that the couple expected.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
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.
Speaker 5 (34:41):
The reason we don't.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
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,
(35:04):
when patients do discover mistakes and hire lawyers like Adam,
those cases rarely see the inside of a courtroom. They're
settled quietly with non disclosure agreements that ensure that details
never become public. The clinic writes a check, the patient
signs away their right to speak about what happened, and
the error effectively disappears. No other patients will ever know,
(35:28):
no regulator will investigate. The clinic can keep advertising its
success rates as if nothing ever went wrong.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
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,
(36:01):
clothes on the ground, it can be dirty, and you
go from the four seasons lobby to the back of
a restaurant.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
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
(36:31):
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
the fertility industry up in abortion politics. They are afraid
of getting regulated out of existence.
Speaker 5 (36:51):
Since Roe v.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
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
(37:14):
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.
Speaker 10 (37:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
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
(38:09):
treatment it was too risky. This ruling changed the political landscape. Overnight,
politicians who'd never mentioned fertility treatment suddenly had to take positions.
This newfound political attention came with consequences. Anti abortion groups
turned their attention to IVF, flooding Capitol Hill with policy proposals.
Speaker 10 (38:33):
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
(38:56):
even improving the outcomes.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
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
(39:22):
been reporting on in this series. What do we do
about the embryos that are lost, mislabeled, or accidentally destroyed,
or about women who feel pushed into unnecessary procedures, or
about something like Lindbergh's baby project. Is there a way
to introduce some protections for a patient who walks through
(39:42):
the door.
Speaker 10 (39:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
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.
Speaker 8 (40:17):
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.
(40:40):
There are no incentives to do it. If they spend
money to upgrade, they are losing money, so there is
financial disincentive and patients don't know, so they are asking
about it and making decisions about it.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
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
(41:16):
between access and safety standards in IBF for other families.
Speaker 8 (41:21):
Women want reproductor of autonomy and investors want growth, but
then there are sometimes when it's misaligned.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
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.
Speaker 8 (41:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
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
(42:17):
than four hundred thousand cycles performed annually, and that number
is expected to keep climbing. Meanwhile, private equity and venture
capital firms continue to pour money into the fertility sector.
Industry reports show that fertility startups raised over eight hundred
million dollars in funding in twenty twenty three alone, with
(42:39):
major chains being consolidated under private equity ownership. Today, more
than forty percent of IVF cycles in the United States
are performed at a clinic owned by private equity, and
that percentage keeps growing and for the time being, there
are no guardrails on the fertility industry. IVF Disrupted The
(43:07):
Kind Body Story is reported and hosted by me Jackie Devalos.
The series is produced by Sean Wen and Jilda Decarly,
editing by Caitlin Kenney, Jeff Grocott, and Joshua Brustein. Blake
Maples is our sound engineer and composer, fact checking by
Anaga Robbins. Bloomberg Senior Executive Editor for Technology is Tom Giles.
(43:31):
Our head of podcasting is Sage Bauman. You can reach
us at podcasts at Bloomberg dot net. IVF Disrupted is
a production of Bloomberg and iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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