A woman accused of stealing thousands of dollars from the customers of her surrogacy agency has been arrested by the FBI and is facing charges of wire fraud and aggravated theft.
Lillian Arielle Markowitz was the owner of several surrogacy agencies: My Donor Cycle, Surrogacy Beyond Borders, and Expecting Surrogacy. She previously told the Los Angeles Times (under the name Lilly Frost), that she kept costs low for her clients by outsourcing to surrogates from Mexico. She also promised customers that they would become parents, no matter how many IVF attempts it took or how many miscarriages they experienced.
Yet her business model came under suspicion and the FBI began investigating her scheme. “She had brilliantly hidden everything beneath the surface,” one client, Gabrielle Ackerman, said. “We had no idea we were stepping into the most horrific chapter of our lives.”
She said the surrogate carrying her child miscarried in Mexico because she wasn’t given adequate medical care. Ackerman and her husband paid over $90,000, but their surrogates repeatedly miscarried. The last one, Itzel, was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia and delivered their baby boy at 28 weeks. While a baby born at that gestation could likely survive in the United States, he could not survive in Mexico. Dr. José Gaytán, Itzel’s doctor, said their medical infrastructure was not equipped to handle such prematurity.
“[These] things are always terrible and I never get used to it,” he told them in an e-mail. Ackerman said Markowitz gave her condolences and promised to send the ashes of their baby boy… which never came.
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“From the day we started there have been so many mistakes in our program, mixed stories and wrong decisions,” Ackerman wrote in an e-mail. “This is the end.”
Ackerman continues to live in fear of what happened to the embryos she and her husband created; she worries that Markowitz sold them in secret. “I’m holding onto hope that our other embryos weren’t sold,” she said. “I worry someone is going to call me one day after a DNA search and say, ‘I’m yours.’”
Other clients noticed that money they paid upfront, meant to be placed in an escrow account to be used only as expenses arose, was frequently emptied; Markowitz would rarely be available to answer questions as to why the money was gone. She allegedly paid the Mexican surrogates $14,000, less than what the average worker in Mexico makes in a year. She said the surrogates were “often single mothers, who saw an opportunity to continue their education or purchase a house for their family while providing this service for our clients.”
Dr. Azul Torres, an IVF cycle coordinator in Cancun, however, told the Los Angeles Times the surrogates usually were poor and had no idea how invasive the surrogacy process would be, or what it would entail. One of the surrogates, who remained anonymous, said she did it to pay off debts. “It was the option that would help my family, and it also seemed noble — to give the gift to another mother,” she said.
Yet the often life-threatening process was also financially risky. One woman, who had gestational diabetes and a urinary tract infection, pleaded with Markowitz to help, as she had not been paid and her medical care had been denied because Surrogacy Beyond Borders had unpaid bills at the medical clinic. “I’m putting my life at risk,” she wrote in Spanish, while Kristen Armstrong, a lawyer who often represented the would-be parents, wrote in an e-mail, “Lilly, This is VERY ALARMING. Why is she not being paid? Why has she not received medical attention in the US? What is going on?!”
Another surrogate said she had to put the unpaid hospital bills on her own personal credit card. Another surrogate was asked by Markowitz to skip doctor-ordered bed rest as a way to save on costs.
Markowitz was eventually found by the FBI in Portland, but had suffered a drug overdose and was taken to the hospital. She left and tried to flee to a bus stop nearby until the FBI was notified about her escape by hospital staff. They brought her back and had officers stay with her in the hospital until she recovered well enough to go to jail.
Surrogacy is not just risky for women; research has found that separating an infant from his or her biological mother can cause lifelong trauma. Though the research is typically related to adoption, the mechanism in surrogacy is the same: a baby is separated from the mother who grew, fed, and nourished him or her for nine months causes trauma. The difference between surrogacy and adoption, however, is that in surrogacy, the child is specifically created with the direct intention of causing that traumatic separation.
