These Couples Dreamed of Having Kids. Instead, They May Have Been Scammed

All Jenna Copeland and her husband wanted was a baby. After 10 grueling years of miscarriages and failed IVF treatments, they thought they had found the solution: a surrogate mother in Alabama to carry their final stored embryo to term, in exchange for a substantial fee.

The surrogate became pregnant in February, and the Copelands were preparing for their gender reveal party earlier this month when they received a devastating message: The escrow company they had contracted to pay their gestational surrogate—the woman carrying their now 20 week-old-baby—was suddenly suspending operations. More than half of the $60,000 they saved to pay their surrogate was missing.

Three states over, in North Carolina, a surrogate who we’ll call Anna was 38 weeks pregnant with another couple’s baby when she got the news. Anna is a single mom with a three-year-old son, and her pregnancy had been so difficult it forced her to quit her full-time job. She depended on the regular payments from the biological parents to feed her son and reimburse her for medical bills. But now all that money was missing—and Anna still had another couple’s baby inside her.

Read more at The Daily Beast.