Venture Capitalist Sues Surrogate Mother After Stillbirth

Losing a baby to a stillbirth is arguably the most heartbreaking outcome an expecting mother can experience.

But what would you do if that stillbirth kicked off a lengthy and protracted legal battle in which your most intimate details are spilled to the police, the courts, and social media?

That’s the horrifying conundrum facing Rebecca Smith, a 34 year old would-be surrogate mother who says her stillbirth almost killed her. Despite almost paying for the unfortunate complication with her life, Smith’s ordeal is far from over — because the unborn child was due to go to Cindy Bi, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who had set aside $200,000 to ensure the pregnancy was a success.

Detailed reporting of the years-long saga by Wired digs into the tragedy facing both sides of the case. More than a simple pregnancy gone wrong, the ordeal is a vivid example of the troubling power dynamics involved in commercial surrogacy.

The whole thing began in 2023, with the wealthy Bi sizing up her stock: Smith, a 34 year old bank manager and former pro athlete from Virginia.

“Tall, healthy, young, good job,” the tech financier told Wired. “I showed her off to my friends. The only thing I was concerned with was she’s a single mom, but I saw past it.”

Smith — a pseudonym used by the tech publication — was soon carrying Bi’s only male embryo, which she had frozen years earlier, the result of a $45,000 agreement between the two.

Everything seemed to be going well. The two women were in constant contact, a fact that came to haunt Smith when she learned Bi had been sharing her intimate details — sans identifying information — with various surrogacy groups on Facebook, in violation of the commercial surrogacy contracts.

Then, when Smith was admitted to the hospital in her 29th week of pregnancy, the mood began to sour. As the womb donor was poked and prodded by doctors, the venture capitalist blew up her phone with questions and suggestions, including another contract to sign.

Soon, Bi began posting accusations on Facebook that Smith had changed her insurance provider without notifying her first. If true, Smith had committed a serious breach of contract.

As Wired notes, this highlights one of the key contradictions in commercial surrogacy: if Smith were to break her contract — she hadn’t, in reality — Bi would have legal cause to stop paying her for her service, as well as for her medical bills incurred by the pregnancy. But when Bi broke her end of the deal, the woman carrying her child had no such leverage.

When the attending doctor eventually discovered that the child had no heartbeat, she explained that the hospital had followed standard care procedures, adding that “these things just happen sometimes.”

Understandably crestfallen, Bi began looking for someone to blame. She eventually came to believe that the stillbirth was “100 percent, 1,000 percent preventable,” as she told Wired.

The grieving mother began combing over the past few months of Smith’s life, hiring a private investigator to look up the woman’s activities, including speeding tickets, parenting habits, and sexual partners. Eventually, Bi came to believe that “lots of unsafe sex” with an “undisclosed live-in boyfriend” resulted in the stillbirth.

“If it were not for all the hard evidence, it’s too shocking to believe [Rebecca Smith] did what she did to kill my son,” the financier posted on Facebook, using Smith’s real name.

Meanwhile, Smith was reeling from the medical complications, including profuse bleeding, which she had to navigate alone — Bi had cut off her escrow payments, and emailed her insurance company claiming the single mother from Virginia was a fraudster.

“I hope she goes to jail. Ideally, for murder,” Bi told Wired. It’s a personal prospect Bi stakes her professional ambitions on. “If I cannot protect my son, if I cannot give him honor, sue the hell out of these people, and have some sense of justice… how can the investment founders say, ‘Cindy, you’re the best?'”

Now, some two years after it started, the ordeal is far from over. After reporting Smith, the hospital and the surrogacy agency to the FBI, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, doxing Smith’s address and personal info, and blasting the single mother’s son’s iPad with graphic photos of the stillbirth.

The whole event is a grim tale of the power imbalance inherent in commercial surrogacy. Since the infamous baby M case in the 1980s, ethics and law scholars have argued that surrogate contracts amount to exploitation of poor and working-class women by the ultra-rich — in other words, the commodification of wombs.

This is illustrated in a number of ways: the way the mother sizes up the surrogate, the offering of a life-changing amount of money, the loss of working time and freedom for the carrier — but not the expecting mother — to say nothing of the legal hypocrisy baked into the agreement.

Far from empowering Rachel Smith, surrogacy left her scarred, distressed, and drowning in legal and medical burdens. Whether the nightmare stops anytime soon is up to one silicon valley financier with an axe to grind, and thousands of dollars to burn.

More on childbirth: New IVF Startup Claims It Can Predict an Embryo’s IQ