Tech-savvy time-saver: Scumbag of the Day

Scary one and good journalism. A surprise they (WSJ) delivered (and one they weren't expecting to):

Keep it up and he can give Kitano a run for his money

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Grad of Tianjin Foreign Studies U.

Nia's internal bleeding was bad. The doctors had to remove her uterus and fallopian tubes. She'll never be able to carry a child again. Nia says the doctors moved her to the orthopedic floor to recover so that the parents, St-Fleur and Scott, wouldn't be able to find her. In the end, St-Fleur and Scott went home with the baby, but Nia's nightmare was far from over.

Nia Trent-Wilson: My contract says after I delivered, the full amount is due. And the full amount due to me still with the complications, with the rest of the money owed, was almost like 75,000.

With the escrow account depleted, there wasn't enough money to pay for Nia's health insurance, meaning Nia didn't have coverage during her C-section and roughly six-hour surgery. Ultimately, Nia is now on the hook for all the medical bills, $182,000. What recourse is there for a surrogate who has an experience like this where they're not paid what the contract says they're owed?

The number of attorneys who feel confident practicing surrogacy law is quite small, and often those attorneys are practicing law in such a way that privileges relationships with parents and surrogacy agencies over surrogates.

Eventually, Nia was able to find an attorney to help pursue the surrogacy agency, ACRC. She alleged that the agency breached its contract with her by matching her with unsuitable parents. ACRC denies the allegation.

In court, ACRC CEO, Shen Li, said the agency believed the intended parents' ability to place so much money at once into the escrow account was sufficient proof of their financial suitability. Ultimately, the judge sided with Nia and ordered ACRC to pay her $41,000. In his ruling, the judge called out the power imbalance between surrogates and agencies. He said that ACRC was able to make money by treating Nia's body as a "profit venturing business" and that the company itself didn't take on much risk during the surrogacy. In an email to the journal, the CEO said, "ACRC remains committed to ethical and responsible surrogacy practices, and to supporting both surrogates and intended parents through what is often a deeply personal process." Nia is still deeply in debt from her third surrogacy. She says she's thinking about the entire industry a lot differently now.

Nia Trent-Wilson: My perception of it has changed because now if you do wrong, there's nobody to report you to. There's nobody to shut you down. They're just like, "Oh, well." And you can continue to keep ruining people's lives and just pick up shop and go across the street and start it all over again.

And the part that surprised me..

Within weeks, the agency approved Nia and matched her with a gay couple in Washington, DC. Their names were Jason St-Fleur and Ricky Lovell Scott, a lawyer and a filmmaker. What were your initial impressions of them?

Nia Trent-Wilson: That they're a nice, normal couple and that they just really long for a child.

...

And Nia had another problem. In her case, the parents weren't even worth suing. Because it turns out, according to Katherine's reporting, Jason St-Fleur and Ricky Scott were broke.

Katherine Long: What I know from legal records is that in the months preceding his contract with ACRC, Ricky Lovell Scott took out a $60,000 loan. He only paid $7,000 without loan. It's not clear to me whether that money was going towards the surrogacy journey, whether he took that $60,000 and put it into Nia's escrow account, but it does speak to a pattern of this couple taking out loans or not paying what they owe and then facing very little judgment.

The lender, SoFi, tried to sue Scott, but had to drop its claim because it couldn't locate him to serve him the complaint.

The surprise - a lawyer can be broke. Someone told me he went into law because he wanted to make a bit of money to retire early. There's a lot of money in law? OMG, are you kidding me. "Is there a lot of money in law"? Are you saying that just to be funny?

Another question - why wouldn't WSJ say more about the ethnicity of this gay couple? Would a white guy behave thus?

Nia Trent-Wilson: At the doctor's appointment, they discovered that only one baby took. And when they discovered that only one baby took as opposed to two, they start calling me a baby killer.

A baby killer. Nia says that one of the intended parents started rolling on the floor, crying. Well, how did you feel in that moment?

Nia Trent-Wilson: A mix of emotions, embarrassed, belittled, ashamed. And I'm already pregnant, so I'm already on all of these IVF medicines, so I'm mentally and emotionally vulnerable right now.