Most people know what a surrogate pregnancy is—you pay someone to gestate your baby. But few know just how horribly it can go wrong. How unregulated the industry is. How “pay someone to have your baby” is a ridiculous, almost laughable oversimplification.
Emi Nietfeld is a memoirist and fertility writer. When she first reached out to us in 2023, with an interest in writing a big WIRED feature on surrogacy, we wondered: Well, is that a WIRED story? We cover fertility, of course. We’ve been to the pro-natalist conventions, talked to the baby designers. Nietfeld was aware. She also pointed out that surrogacy is where the actual human drama is. And that it was quietly exploding, especially in Silicon Valley. So find us a specific story, we said.
Around that time, one of Nietfeld’s sources suggested she talk to a woman named Cindy Bi. Bi was a venture capitalist in her forties, and in 2023 she had found a surrogate to carry her and her husband’s only male embryo. It ended tragically—the baby was stillborn—and Bi believed the surrogate was to blame. She was now in the process of doing everything she could to prove that. Everything she humanly, and at times inhumanly, could.
Nietfeld spent the better part of a year working on this story. Bi gave her nearly everything: thousands of emails, texts, records, court documents. Nietfeld used them all, and countless interviews, to reconstruct the events. She’s a gifted storyteller, with an eye for the just-right detail, a subtle control of context, and a way with cliff-hangers. As the drama unfolds, perspectives shift, new facts come to light, and a miracle devolves into a nightmare.
Is it the story about surrogacy? Nietfeld would say no. Stories like this happen all the time—you just don’t hear about them. This, we hope, goes some way toward changing that. Readers spent more time reading this story than any other piece WIRED published in 2025. It prompted a huge conversation online. And it turned out to be a WIRED story to its core. There’s something to the psychology of a person in tech that demands control—control of others, control of the world. When that control is lost? Watch out.
