America’s elites are exploiting working-class women to produce the next upper echelon
By ANJALI IYER — amiyer@ucdavis.edu
In 2023, Rebecca Smith (a pseudonym) agreed to become a surrogate for Silicon Valley venture capitalist Cindy Bi. Once Smith signed the contract, she was promptly impregnated with a male embryo and saddled with binding legal ties to Bi and her husband. Despite the fact that Bi had budgeted over $200,000 for the birth of two embryos, Smith was compensated with $45,000 to put her body, profession and life at risk.
The pregnancy began relatively smoothly, as Bi took it upon herself to micromanage every aspect of Smith’s lifestyle. Bi went so far as to allegedly share Smith’s health records on an anonymous Facebook account in an abhorrent violation of Smith’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) rights. Suddenly, at the 29-week-mark, Smith began experiencing abnormal bleeding and nearly died from a hemorrhage. As she fought for her life in a hospital bed, Bi’s only priority was to coerce her into signing yet another contract.
Unfortunately, the baby was stillborn. Bi and her husband were understandably devastated, but Bi’s sadness quickly turned to anger. She attacked Smith on social media, blaming her for the baby’s death, claiming it was “1,000 percent preventable.” She refused to pay Smith, doxxed her online and even went so far as to attempt to put her in jail by smothering her with a barrage of legal charges. In a chilling quote, Bi describes how she felt compelled to respond to the death of her baby with every form of revenge possible to prevent looking weak to investment founders, instead of taking the time to prioritize her healing from this tragedy.
As surrogacy has become an increasingly common method for having children, it’s moved to the forefront of a contentious cultural discussion. Personally, I take no issue with a mutually beneficial decision between consenting adults. Surrogacy is a great option for couples who are unable or are unwilling to have biological children through typical reproductive means. Often, the surrogate is someone they know, such as a sibling or close friend. However, in many cases, a surrogate is found through an agency that matches couples with women willing to birth children for monetary compensation.
As reflected in the Smith and Bi case, stranger surrogacy can lead to mismatched expectations and a dangerous power imbalance. Bi’s willingness to weaponise her wealth to exact revenge and sacrifice Smith in the process is indicative of her attitude towards the woman she used to birth her children. In recent years, billionaires and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have become enamoured with surrogacy in a bizarre attempt to circumvent the declining birthrate and produce genetically designed superbabies. Notorious pronatalist Elon Musk has conceived numerous children through in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy. He intends to produce as many “elite” children as possible by taking advantage of his role as the chief executive officer of X to scour the site for potential mothers. To ensure his success, Musk also coerces his female employees into having his children, allegedly using his position of power to financially reward and punish his surrogates as he so chooses.
This rising trend reveals a more troubling insight into the minds of a class so removed from society that they feel entitled to the bodies of anyone less wealthy, whose lives are seen as expendable. The way in which these billionaires exploit their surrogates seems reflective of the business practices that brought them to the top — using money and power to control both their subordinates and financial outcomes.
This pattern is also reflected in the surrogate project run by billionaire Greg Lindberg, whose methods include finding women with Aryan traits and coercing them into donating their eggs without disclosing his eugenicist intentions — he has dubbed this venture his “baby project.” In one case, he pressured his girlfriend Anya (a pseudonym) into donating over 20 eggs to impregnate a surrogate mother, for which she was provided with $1.5 million to waive her parental rights. In hopes of creating up to 50 “elite” Aryan children, Lindberg has built a network of contractually obligated women to donate eggs and birth his children in furtherance of his deluded cause.
Bi, Musk and Lindberg’s obsession with surrogacy highlights the growing divide between the ultra-wealthy and a weakening middle class. These business moguls embark on relentless pursuits to ensnare willing surrogates that they can use as disposable wombs, only to abandon them the minute they consider the fetus “imperfect.” Or, more insidiously, they attack their surrogates with litigation to drain their resources. More often than not, billionaires’ search for surrogates is nothing more than a self-aggrandising quest to produce what they consider to be “superior” children.
Billionaires are often plagued by an obsession with perfection and a compulsion to achieve “greater goals:” no matter the cost. But, when you have the means to solve every problem with money, tensions arise in situations where money cannot account for every variable. Pregnancy is an organic process with so many possibilities and risks; while having access to wealth decreases the maternal and infant mortality rate, no amount of money can prevent unforeseen emergencies. Perhaps it’s time that Silicon Valley billionaires understand that wealth has no power over nature.
Written by: Anjali Iyer — amiyer@ucdavis.edu
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