12 September 2026 , 18:39
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When commercial surrogacy agency World Center of Baby told clients it was filing for bankruptcy, hopeful parents and pregnant surrogates were thrown into chaos. The agency’s opaque ownership and operations raise questions over its business practices and who was responsible for the human suffering left in its wake.
The promise was a seamless journey towards building a family.
Advertising services across Ukraine, Albania, Georgia, Cyprus, and Mexico, the commercial surrogacy agency World Center of Baby presented itself as a one-stop shop that would help match hopeful parents with surrogates and coordinate complex medical and legal processes.
Some of the agency’s surrogacy packages were priced at more than $100,000.
But in February 2026, the agency sent an email to prospective parents announcing that it was declaring bankruptcy in the U.S., where its apparent main corporate entity was registered in Florida as World Center Group Corp.
The announcement triggered chaos. Online forums lit up with intended parents looking for help, saying they had been abandoned by the agency, sometimes in the midst of their surrogacy process. Reporters spoke with six couples and two single intended fathers who said they had incurred financial losses ranging into tens of thousands of dollars. For some, that spelled the end of their dream of becoming a parent.
Meanwhile, surrogates either in the midst of fertility treatments or already pregnant were left unpaid and unsupported.
World Center of Baby had been coordinating the compensation that intended parents were obliged to provide to surrogates in the form of monthly fees, medical care coverage, and a major payment after the birth of the child.
Yet six surrogates and the family of another told reporters that the agency had stopped making monthly payments to them as far back as November 2025.
Their cases are likely to be the tip of the iceberg. While it is not clear how many surrogates were affected in total, one former employee claimed that, in one week in December alone, seven women gave birth in Mexico without receiving their compensation.
To understand the fallout of World Center of Baby’s collapse, reporters spoke to:
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The relatives of a young surrogate from Ukraine who was carrying a child for an intended father in the U.K. and died in Albania in the weeks after the agency announced it planned to declare bankruptcy. Her family raised concerns over whether she received adequate medical monitoring as the agency fell apart. Albanian prosecutors have opened a probe into the circumstances of her death.
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A Brazilian couple and the Ukrainian surrogate who carried their twins. They told reporters that the thousands of euros the couple had paid to the agency for the birth of the children was never forwarded on to the surrogate. The couple was stranded in war-torn Ukraine for a month as they sought to cover the surrogate’s missing payments by borrowing from their family so that she could sign the babies over to them and they could go home.
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A couple in the U.K. who paid upfront fees weeks before the bankruptcy announcement and never got their money back, despite the process going nowhere. They have since filed a civil lawsuit in a U.S. court alleging breach of contract and fraud, accusing the agency of knowing it would not be able to deliver on its promises. Court documents show that World Center Group Corp. and its representatives have not responded and a “final judgement after default” hearing is set for October.
As those affected seek answers and accountability, reporters found that World Center of Baby’s operations were shrouded in corporate opacity, raising questions over its business practices and who was responsible for the human toll it left behind.
Even basic information such as who owned the agency and its corporate structure is unclear. Reporters also found that individuals listed on corporate filings and other company paperwork appeared to be proxies who claimed minimal knowledge of or involvement in World Center of Baby. And while it said it was going to file for bankruptcy imminently, there is no record such a petition was ever submitted.
Ukrainian businessman Vladyslav Natochii, who is variously listed on previous versions of the agency’s website as its founder, owner, and managing director, told reporters that World Center of Baby had “experienced a severe financial and operational crisis,” and denied wrongdoing. (His name was removed from the website last year and he does not appear on Florida corporate filings. Natochii did not respond to reporters’ questions about his specific role at the agency at the time of its collapse.)
“Debts and unfulfilled obligations do not, in themselves, establish fraud or criminal intent. I recognize that clients, surrogate mothers, employees, and partners experienced serious hardship during this period, and I deeply regret that,” he said.
“World Center of Baby operated for more than seven years, and more than 350 children were born through programs associated with the brand. Reducing the company’s entire history solely to its period of crisis creates an incomplete and distorted account of its activities,” Natochii said.
What will happen to the embryos and other genetic material that was being held by the agency is also under question.
One couple who were previously clients of World Center of Baby told reporters they had been contacted by a different agency telling them that their genetic material was being safely stored – and offering them a new surrogacy package for tens of thousands of dollars. A former employee of World Center of Baby said she was personally funding the storage of some genetic material but did not know how long she could continue.
What is Commercial Surrogacy?
In commercial surrogacy, a woman is paid more than just her medical expenses to carry and deliver a child for another person or couple.
Although some countries have banned for-profit surrogacy, it is still allowed in many U.S. states as well as in Ukraine, Georgia, and parts of Mexico – all of which were focal points for World Center of Baby.
In those jurisdictions there are varying legal parameters around who surrogates can carry babies for. In Ukraine, for example, the option is only available for married heterosexual couples, whereas in the United States surrogacy is also open to gay couples and single people.
There are no overarching international surrogacy regulations. This year The Hague Conference on Private International Law, an inter-governmental organization that works on treaties, suspended its work on a cross-border parentage and surrogacy framework citing policy differences among the countries in the working group.
Legal experts warned that what happened at World Center of Baby highlights vulnerabilities within the commercial surrogacy industry due to a lack of coherent regulation and the legal complexities of what are often transnational arrangements.
Kirsty Horsey, a professor of law at Loughborough University who specializes in surrogacy regulation, said that hopeful parents who face a surrogacy ban in their home country or believe there will be a long wait due to local regulations sometimes turn to international agencies operating in countries with looser rules.
While there are responsible agencies, less ethical operations often guarantee that clients will go home with a baby – in less time, for less money, and with less bureaucracy – but are not transparent about how they operate or the legal issues the prospective parents may face, including the processes they will need to go through to become the legal parent of their child in their home countries, Horsey said.
"These agencies know that the market is out there. They’re playing on desperation," she added.
In countries such as Albania, which is reportedly an increasingly popular destination for international fertility centers, surrogacy is unregulated and operates in a legal gray area. But even where there is legislation, like in the U.S., if the actual medical procedures take place elsewhere, experts said it can be hard for surrogates and intended parents to know where to seek legal recourse when things go wrong.
“We see cross-jurisdictional cases more and more,” said Bianca Jackson, a British lawyer who specializes in surrogacy cases.
“What you’re getting is a surrogate living in one jurisdiction, giving birth in another jurisdiction, a clinic in a third jurisdiction, the intended parents in a fourth jurisdiction, and that obviously is going to complicate matters, especially where the law is different between all the jurisdictions,” Jackson said.
Cyra Akila Choudhury, a law professor at Florida International University who is an expert in transnational commercial surrogacy, said that while many countries have laws regulating relationships between surrogates and clinics, or between agencies and intended parents, the agencies themselves – which she described as intermediaries or middlemen – are regulated as ordinary businesses, meaning there is no recognition of the human stakes involved.
“The consequences of a company arranging surrogacies going bankrupt are not like for any other company," she said. “In this kind of scenario, the surrogates are the most vulnerable people. Their only recourse is to sue for payment. That generally doesn’t happen when a company collapses."
A Hack, an Investigation, and an Elusive Director
While World Center of Baby told clients it had gone bankrupt, reporters were unable to obtain financial records that could shed light on what led to the agency’s demise. Obtaining other records was similarly challenging.
As reporters pieced together World Center of Baby’s recent history, they found that even its current status was difficult to define.
Despite the email sent out in February, at the time of publication there was no federal court record that World Center Group Corp. had ever filed for bankruptcy. The company remained listed as “active” on the Florida registry at the time of publication, listing a mass registration address in Florida’s St. Petersburg used by tens of thousands of companies as its contact.
The agency’s website has also remained online, with a banner stating it was not accepting new clients because “the company is fully focused on fulfilling and completing the existing programs."
But phone numbers listed online for World Center of Baby no longer connect and intended parents already working with the agency told reporters they have received no further updates about its bankruptcy proceedings or next steps.
Some parents have formed support groups seeking answers and accountability. And in May, World Center of Baby’s website was briefly taken over by unknown hackers threatening to expose its practices, without giving further detail.
Meanwhile, authorities abroad are scrutinizing the agency’s local activities. In the Republic of Cyprus, where commercial surrogacy is illegal, Limassol police confirmed an ongoing investigation into allegations against World Center of Baby including advertising illegal practices such as sex selection of embryos and the transfer of multiple embryos to a surrogate. The investigation started last year and as of August no charges have been brought.
Limassol police also said that there is no company registered in Cyprus under the agency’s name, and that there were no offices at two addresses the agency listed.
More broadly, World Center of Baby’s corporate structure and ownership of various entities operating under the brand are hard to pin down, making it difficult to track how the agency really worked.
Natochii — the Ukrainian businessman who by 2019 was listed on the agency’s website as its founder and managing director — owned World Center of Baby’s now-shuttered Alice Clinic in Kyiv until May this year and still owns another fertility clinic of the same name in the Georgian capital Tbilisi.
(According to filings to Georgia’s public business registry, the clinic reported it had outstanding unpaid tax bills as of April 2026. While the clinic leased a building in Tbilisi between 2023 and 2024, a visit to the address revealed a dental practice in its place. Natochii did not comment when asked by reporters about the unpaid tax bill.)
An archived biography from World Center of Baby’s website says that Natochii started out working with his mother to organize adoptions between Spanish people and Ukrainians before registering the company. It describes his commitment to helping create families as his “life mission.” Trademarks filed in the U.S. and in the EU for the brand “World Center of Baby” are registered by Natochii.
Yet although the U.S.-registered World Center Group Corp. authored the agency’s surrogacy contracts and is listed as the copyright holder on its website, Natochii does not appear on its Florida corporate filings.
He did not respond to questions from reporters about his role in the company, the cause of its financial failure, or why World Center of Baby had not communicated with surrogates and intended parents since sending the email about its imminent bankruptcy.
“In light of ongoing legal matters, I will not publicly comment on individual cases, financial transactions, medical matters, or the internal structures of the relevant legal entities,” he said.
Other people listed in corporate records claimed minimal involvement.
The listed president of the U.S.-registered World Center Group Corp., American citizen Yuri Star, told reporters he had been hired as a consultant to register the company and knew nothing about it or why it collapsed. He said he was not a shareholder, investor, or beneficiary, and was still owed money for his services.
“I have nothing to do with the company whatsoever. I’ve never signed any documents. I’ve never signed any contracts,” Star told reporters by phone. In a subsequent email, he wrote: “I did not know who its employees were. I did not know how many clients it had. Its actual operations — clients, clinics, staff, programmes — were conducted entirely outside the legal entity whose filings and banking I administered.”
Star said Natochii had instructed him to open U.S. bank accounts for World Center Group Corp., and that after doing so, he had transferred account access to Natochii, who he said conducted banking transactions or instructed other staff to make payments.
He said that his last contact with Natochii was “approximately eight months ago,” when Natochii asked him to open a new company bank account after a previous one was “de-banked.” (Natochii did not respond to requests for comment on Star’s role.)
Reporters were unable to reach the U.S. entity’s listed director Malvina Jonas, whose signature was on World Center of Baby’s email declaring imminent bankruptcy as well as other emails and documents sent to intended parents.
Five employees who spoke with reporters said they had never met or spoken with Jonas, and one of the employees claimed her signature was automated. Reporters were unable to track down Jonas but found that IP addresses associated with her digital signature did indeed come from multiple locations around the world.
The Georgian Proxy
A Terms of Service document still on World Center of Baby’s website at the time of publication listed the agency’s contact person as a Georgian man in Tbilisi called Zurab Shvelidze, alongside the address of a company with a slightly different name – Global Center of Baby.
That company was registered in March 2025 to a residential address in Tbilisi that has also been used to register multiple other businesses.
But when reporters spoke with Shvelidze he said he was unaware that his name and contact details were on the website and claimed he had no idea that he was the listed representative for a surrogacy agency.
He said that he had been contacted by a friend who told him he could earn $100 a month and that he became the “nominal head” of Global Center of Baby because he needed the money, and then helped open a bank account in its name.
Shvelidze shared a March 2025 agreement between himself and a law firm called Georgia Business and Residential Law. Under the terms, Shvelidze was to provide “nominee director and shareholder services” to its client. Later that month he signed a declaration that he was nominal director and shareholder of Global Center of Baby. (Georgia Business and Residential Law said it could not comment on reporters’ questions due to client confidentiality.)
Messages between Shvelidze and the Georgian law firm, which Shvelidze shared with reporters, indicate that the Bank of Georgia shut down access to Global Center of Baby’s account by December 2025, as well as Shvelidze’s personal accounts there. The bank confirmed to reporters that it currently does not hold accounts for the firm or for Shvelidze.
Daniel Epshtein, who is Ukrainian and confirmed to reporters he was the chief operating officer of World Center of Baby, said that despite holding that title, he had no access to company bank accounts, and no authority over financial decisions or allocation of client funds.
“My responsibilities were operational in nature: managing the coordinator and curator teams, maintaining relationships with partner clinics and service providers, and submitting requests to the finance department for operational expenditures,” he said.
“I raised concerns internally when it became clear that payments to partners, surrogates, and service providers were not being made, but those decisions were not within my authority, “ he added.
While figures associated with the agency deny responsibility for its demise, families around the world try to pick up the pieces from their dealings with World Center of Baby.
The Surrogates
Yana was hundreds of miles away from her home in Ukraine, holed up in a flat in Albania’s capital Tirana, when she and the unborn baby she was carrying for a U.K.-based man died in April 2026 – two months after World Center of Baby had sent out the email to clients declaring that it was going bankrupt. She was eight months pregnant.
By speaking with her boyfriend and her sister, as well as reviewing surrogacy agreements drawn up by World Center of Baby, reporters reconstructed her final months as the agency fell apart.
Yana, a pseudonym used at the request of her family, was in her 20s, with a young child in Ukraine, and viewed surrogacy as a path to economic security. Her boyfriend told reporters that she wanted to buy a house and invest in her business with the money.
She had traveled to Albania in August 2025 for a successful embryo transfer procedure. Once back in Ukraine, her pregnancy was monitored by World Center of Baby’s Alice Clinic in Kyiv, her sister told reporters.
But by February 2026, Yana’s boyfriend said that she had stopped receiving her monthly payments via the agency. Communication from her medical coordinator at World Center of Baby also sputtered out, Yana’s boyfriend said. Her sister said the clinic “fell apart.” (When reporters visited the Kyiv clinic they found it shuttered and locked up. Calls no longer go through and emails bounce back.)
An unsigned contract between Yana and the intended father, authored by the U.S. entity World Center Group Corp. and sent to reporters by her boyfriend, said that the intended father was due to pay her a total of around $25,000 if everything went well – including $600-700 a month during the pregnancy and $15,400 within five days of her discharge from hospital after giving birth.
It is unclear whether this was the final contract between Yana and the intended father, or whether she ever signed it.
The agreement stipulated that all communications between Yana and the intended father must take place via the agency. But, as support fell away, Yana started communicating directly with him, her sister said. (The intended father did not respond to reporters’ requests for comment.)
Instead of sending her money via the agency, the intended father began paying her costs directly, according to Yana’s boyfriend, including medical visits to the hospital in Albania and the rented apartment in Tirana where she was found dead on April 22.
Albania was specified as the birth destination on Yana’s unsigned contract. While reporters could find no business registered in Albania under the agency’s name, World Center of Baby advertised its services there, saying the country’s lack of legislation offered a path to surrogacy for “married and unmarried couples, homosexual couples, and single men.”
Yana traveled to Tirana in early March, where her sister said she had checkups at American Hospital 3 (The hospital did not respond to reporters’ request for comment.)
Text messages seen by reporters show that in the hours before her death, she had been repeatedly complaining to her boyfriend of a terrible headache.
She was found by police after family members raised the alarm because they could not reach her by phone.
It is still not clear what happened to Yana, whose death certificate simply states: “sudden death.” The official autopsy report from Albania is still underway according to prosecutors, who said a criminal report had been registered over Yana’s death and that the case was currently at the preliminary investigation stage.
Yana’s sister said that staff at the morgue where her body was taken told her she had died due to high sugar levels, leading her to question whether that should have been picked up during hospital visits.
Yana had not wanted to go to Albania for the surrogacy procedures, but had to because of the agreement she had made, her sister said.
“She just wanted to return to her country, where there were people who loved her,” her sister told reporters.
World Center of Baby’s Natochii said there was no “causal connection” between his actions and the death of the surrogate in Albania.
As well as surrogates in Ukraine, World Center of Baby worked with surrogates in Mexico and advertised on social media for surrogates in Armenia and Georgia, reporters found, sometimes through its social media-based brand MamaTak (“Mom, yes” in Ukrainian).
World Center of Baby’s website claimed its surrogates were “taken care of in the best way possible for a successful gestation period.”
But one 27-year-old Ukrainian woman who asked to use the pseudonym Maria to protect her identity, said the experience halted her dream of someday owning a house.
She told reporters that she did not receive the $20,800 from World Center of Baby in February that she was contracted to get after giving birth to twins for a couple based in Brazil.
Although the Brazilian couple are making up the money she is owed — on top of the money they had originally paid to World Center of Baby for her compensation and never received back — they are doing it in installments, meaning she is still owed thousands of dollars.
“My intention was to buy a house. Not a big one, not a huge one… so my kids could have the sense of having something of their own. So that’s my major loss," Maria said.
The Parents
Roberta and Felipe Martins are the Brazilian couple who were matched with Maria and are now parents to the twins she delivered in Ukraine. They said they decided to opt for surrogacy after Roberta, now 28, was left unable to have children due to health issues.
They described the people they dealt with from World Center of Baby as friendly, warm, and attentive. But in early February, when they were already in Ukraine preparing to bring the children home, they said they sensed something was wrong.
Roberta and Felipe said their coordinator told them they should make their final payment in cash, rather than to the bank listed on their invoice due to unspecified banking problems. Uncomfortable with these instructions, they decided to stick to the payment details on the invoice and sent 14,500 euros (the equivalent of around $17,000) via Wise in two installments to the agency’s First Horizon Bank account as their final outstanding payment.
The couple and Maria told reporters that within days of the birth they were supposed to meet to sign a document allowing the Brazilians to register the babies as their own, as is required in Ukraine. At that point, the agency should have delivered the final payment, Maria said.
But at least 10 days after the birth, the appointment had still not been arranged. Maria said she was also missing her final monthly payment from January and by this time was hearing rumors from other surrogates that the agency was in financial trouble.
Maria and the couple began to communicate directly. Roberta and Felipe also confronted their coordinator about the delays, and were told the agency was having financial problems and that the coordinator herself had not received her salary for two months. (Reporters’ messages to the coordinator went unanswered).
The couple tried to recall the payments they had made via Wise, but Wise told them their requests had failed due to “the beneficiary bank’s lack of response and the nature of the dispute with the third party, both of which are outside Wise’s control,” in correspondence seen by reporters. Wise told reporters it was unable to share details related to specific customer cases due to legal restrictions. First Horizon Bank declined to comment.
Eventually the couple said they borrowed $5,000 from their family to pay Maria directly and agreed to send her monthly payments of $1,000 to cover the money she was still owed, so that she could sign the document stating she agreed to their registration of the newborns as their own. They spent over a month in Ukraine trying to finalize the paperwork.
“There were a lot of attacks in the region, you know? And where we were, too,” said Roberta, describing a bomb in a garbage can that exploded in the city of Lviv where they picked up their newborns.
On a call with reporters they showed their twins’ colorful bedroom, brightly decorated with a hand-painted mural of a farm landscape, far from the conflict zone where they were born. But they still feel a sense of injustice for Maria.
“We would like to get back the money we paid that she never received. We want to resolve Maria’s situation — for her to receive her money, for everything to be made right, for the company to honor its debt to her,” said Roberta.
They were unsure in which jurisdiction they could file a legal complaint because the contract was signed in Ukraine, but the money was sent to an account in the U.S., said Felipe.
Despite such hurdles, other intended parents have managed to take legal action.
A couple in the U.K. has filed a complaint against World Center Group Corp. in Florida on five counts, including breach of contract and fraud, and are seeking damages. The complaint accuses the company of “a calculated and coordinated scheme” to secure substantial payments for promised services despite its worsening financial and operational problems.
The couple, who spoke with reporters but asked not to be named, paid $87,415 for World Center of Baby’s "Double VIP Guarantee Surrogacy Program," which was meant to provide surrogate matching, medical coordination, and program management through the birth of two children. In the end, they received none of it, the lawsuit alleges.
Their legal complaint echoes similar experiences other clients of World Center of Baby shared with reporters.
“The conduct described herein is not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern of deceptive and unfair practices,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit names Yuri Star and Malvina Jonas as individual defendants, alongside World Center Group Corp.
“My position is being addressed through my legal representatives, and I do not think it appropriate to argue the merits through the press,” Star told reporters. Natochii said that allegations made in civil litigation “should not be presented as established fact.”
The couple told reporters that when their contact at World Center of Baby said their program could no longer go ahead, they asked for their money back – but were told there was only 450 euros left in the company bank account.
“We were devastated because we might as well have taken that money and thrown it down the drain,” one member of the couple told reporters. “But we’re lucky that we weren’t halfway through the process finding out there’s a surrogate carrying our baby who hasn’t been paid.”
I can’t imagine what it must be like for all those vulnerable women who haven’t been paid carrying someone else’s child, and all those intended parents who had started their journey to having a family. Our hearts absolutely break for them.
Intended parent from the U.K. who has filed a complaint against World Center Group Corp.
Even as far back as 2024, there were signs all was not well at World Center of Baby, according to California-based couple Jennifer Rastegar and her husband Hector Barocio.
They paid more than $100,000 to the agency for its “Unlimited Double” package, an expensive plan that allowed for multiple attempts to have a child.
The couple told reporters they decided to go down the surrogacy route after Jennifer was given a hysterectomy during an operation to remove an ovarian cyst. They said they had opted to seek the treatment in Mexico because it is near their home in California and because Hector is a dual U.S.-Mexican national.
They had read positive reviews of World Center of Baby online and soon got into reviewing egg donor options as the first step in their process with the agency. But despite promises that a donor and doctor had been lined up, correspondence seen by reporters showed that the agency stalled and made excuses for months until the couple asked for their money back. Emails and documents shared with OCCRP confirmed their payments and subsequent frustration.
In October 2024, an email signed by Malvina Jonas offered to return just $22,000 of the more than $100,000 they had paid, claiming that the sending of a sperm sample to a clinic in Mexico City counted as an office visit. They were later sent another email from World Center of Baby which offered them $90,000 under a confidential settlement agreement and requested that they remove any negative comments they had made about their experience. But the couple told reporters they wanted a full refund.
They are now pursuing the case in Mexico through a lawyer there.
“We are still trying to have kids via another outlet. When I hit 50 I will give up,” said Jennifer, who turned 49 in June.
The Mystery Agency Offering To Help – At a Price
As questions continue to swirl about World Center of Baby, some former clients have been approached by another surrogacy enterprise encouraging them to continue their journey by spending yet more money.
In June, a couple who said they had previously had embryos preserved at Alice Clinic in Kyiv received an email from a representative of Blue Oak Fertility, claiming that their biomaterials were “safe and cryopreserved.”
The email said the agency was partnering with “the clinic in Ukraine” for a “Special Sibling Transition Program” so clients could add to their existing families by using their preserved materials – at a cost of more than 40,000 euros.
But, as with World Center of Baby, details about who is behind Blue Oak Fertility are hard to come by.
Blue Oak Fertility’s website says it is U.S.-based and first registered as a legal entity in 2017, before launching the Blue Oak Fertility brand this year. It offers international surrogacy programs costing as much as $200,000 and claims to be “escrow-first” for safe payment.
It lists a Florida phone number on its email sign-off, but reporters found no entity registered with the name Blue Oak Fertility in Florida. When contacted by reporters, Blue Oak Fertility initially offered to send corporate registration documentation confirming its history, but did not do so despite repeated requests.
Reporters also found no registered brands or trademarks under the name Blue Oak Fertility on a database maintained by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a United Nations agency that aggregates intellectual property data from 194 countries.
Reporters did, however, find several personnel overlaps between Blue Oak Fertility and World Center of Baby.
Web domain records reveal that World Center of Baby’s registered president Yuri Star is the registrant of the domain name of Blue Oak Fertility’s website, created in April 2026. And one intended parent received an email in July signed off by Daniel Epshtein, former COO of World Center of Baby, with a list of possible countries and prices the agency was offering.
Speaking to reporters by phone, Star described Blue Oak Fertility as “a totally third party that’s been in business for 10 or 12 years,” and denied any connection with World Center of Baby. In a subsequent email, he wrote that he did not know the company behind the brand. “I was not party to any agreement with, and was given no information about, any owning company," Star said, adding that he had been hired as a consultant to register Blue Oak Fertility’s domain and perform related administrative work.
Epshtein told reporters there was “no corporate or financial connection” between Blue Oak Fertility and World Center of Baby and that he had also worked with other agencies as an independent specialist since World Center of Baby’s collapse. None of World Center of Baby’s clients who he had reached out to had ultimately gone to Blue Oak Fertility, he said.
Blue Oak Fertility also told reporters the agency has no corporate, financial, or operational relationship with World Center of Baby or World Center Group Corp.
Both Epshtein and Blue Oak Fertility said they had stepped in after the collapse of World Center of Baby in an attempt to help those whose biomaterials had been left behind. Blue Oak Fertility said it was among a number of agencies that had reached out to World Center of Baby’s former clients to see if they were interested in a further surrogacy program, among other options.
But one former World Center of Baby client who asked to remain anonymous to protect her family’s privacy said that receiving an email out of the blue from Blue Oak Fertility had been profoundly disturbing.
“Four years after our only daughter was born we had to make the decision to destroy our remaining embryos. It was a gut-wrenching decision that took us months to make,” she told reporters.
“We signed the consent forms and heard no more so assumed they were destroyed, until we received an email from a new company offering us a discount to do another surrogacy with the embryos we had already grieved for.”
The former World Center of Baby client said she had responded to the email asking for confirmation that the embryos had been destroyed but had received no answer.
“We are shocked, confused and upset as we don’t know if the embryos were actually destroyed or sold to a company to be used elsewhere,” she said. (Blue Oak Fertility did not respond to a request for comment on her case.)
Meanwhile, the former acting director of World Center of Baby’s Alice Clinic in Kyiv, Iryna Myronova, said she had been urging previous employees of World Center of Baby to help intended parents relocate their genetic material and was personally funding the preservation of some genetic material at a new premises – but did not know how long she would be able to keep it there.
“I don’t know when they might simply change the locks — and that’s it, it will all be lost,” she said.
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