Surrogacy Broker in “Baby-Selling Ring” Sent to Prison
A former attorney, until recently a respected figure in the field of reproductive law, has been sentenced to five months in prison for her role in a surrogacy scheme that the FBI and federal prosecutors called a “baby-selling ring.”
Hilary Neiman, along with prominent surrogacy lawyer Theresa Erickson and Carla Chambers, who helped recruit women to be surrogates, pleaded guilty this past August to wire fraud and other charges connected to the scheme. In addition to her prison term, Neiman was ordered to serve seven months of home detention, and to forfeit $133,000 in profits. Erickson and Chambers will be sentenced next year.
California is considered a "surrogacy-friendly" state in part because it allows commissioning parents to avoid adoption procedures as long as they make an agreement with a surrogate before she becomes pregnant. Neiman and her co-conspirators instead created what prosecutors called an "inventory of babies," and then told prospective clients that the infants would be available within a few months ̶ and thus at a higher price ̶ because the original intended parents had backed out of their deals. The previously recruited surrogates had been sent to IVF clinics in the Ukraine to become impregnated.
At this week’s sentencing hearing before San Diego U.S. District Judge Anthony Battaglia, Neiman’s lawyer told the court that his client was duped by the other two defendants, and that she continued to work with them after beginning to suspect that “something was amiss” because she was motivated to satisfy desperate clients who wanted a child. According to news reports, Neiman told the judge she regretted what she had done. “I knew better than this,” she said. “I didn’t listen to myself. And I’m sorry.”
Judge Battaglia was apparently dubious, and rejected a prior plea agreement that called for Neiman to serve nine months in home confinement. “You preyed upon the weak. You preyed upon the desperate,” he told her.
The Erickson / Neiman baby-selling operation ran from 2005 to 2011, when it was broken up by an FBI investigation. During those years, several other scandals involving surrogacy and egg brokers also surfaced (1, 2).
Back in 1987, during the “Baby M” surrogacy case, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen commented that in “most states, it is more legally complicated to open a hot dog stand than to produce a child by surrogate motherhood.” Notwithstanding the prison term handed down in this egregious case, that assessment remains accurate.
Previously on Biopolitical Times: