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Fertility Inc.: ‘Our Money Was Gone’

March 13, 2026·26 min·2 clips

Anna Maria got a call that her surrogate wasn't being paid, and her husband said, 'Our money's gone.'

Anna Maria Galazzi and her husband had been planning a family since their first date. She was diagnosed with stage-four hormone-receptive breast cancer in 2019, which both required indefinite chemotherapy and stripped her of the ability to carry a child herself, forcing a difficult reckoning with her Italian Catholic faith before she could pursue IVF and gestational surrogacy. With help from an Austin surrogacy agency, she and her husband spent roughly ninety thousand dollars of her father's inheritance on one successful round, producing a son named Michael, and then took a second mortgage to fund a second attempt that ended in miscarriage. At the point of attempting to implant a fourth embryo, they received a call informing them that their surrogate was not being paid and that no one could reach anyone at the escrow company. WSJ reporter Ben Foldy explains that fertility escrow is a financial instrument designed to solve the trust problem between intended parents who do not want to pay in full before having a baby and surrogates who need assurance of payment before carrying someone else's child. Unlike home sale escrow, fertility escrow agents also manage payments to insurance companies, doctors, agencies, and any additional expenses incurred during the pregnancy, making them active administrative processors of large sums of money over extended periods. The company SEAM collapsed with its clients' funds still in the accounts, with no federal regulatory body overseeing it, no licensing requirements, and no minimum capital standards. Clients like Anna Maria had no way to verify the financial soundness of the company because no public reporting was required. The episode draws a direct structural parallel to the previous episode about mega-wealthy Chinese clients exploiting the same regulatory vacuum, showing that the lack of oversight harms both the most and least powerful participants in the system. The tone is emotionally grounded in Anna Maria's story and analytically precise in Foldy's reporting, together building a case that the fertility industry's framing of itself as a personal emotional journey has been used to resist the oversight structures that commercial financial products typically carry.

As heard by us

A sharp, humane look at how fertility dreams can become six-figure financial exposure.

Fertility Inc.: 'Our Money Was Gone' follows Anna Maria Galazzi from a first-date certainty about wanting children into the expensive, contractual world of assisted reproduction and surrogacy.

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Why you'd press play

You want the money trail behind a surrogacy contract.

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