At his peak, [Greg] Lindberg controlled several insurance companies and had a net worth of more than $1 billion. Over the past several years, he’s been twice convicted in federal court of bribery and is facing as many as 30 years in prison. … None of his legal troubles, however, seemed to put much of a dent in what he called “the baby project.”
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Today, Lindberg has at least 12 kids, including nine born over the past five years or so. … Several people with direct knowledge of his motivations say he sought out partners with distinctly Aryan looks. Two say Lindberg was obsessed with having as many as 50 kids. Five egg donors say that if they’d known the whole truth, they wouldn’t have gone through with it.
“I assumed it was for a family in Los Angeles,” says one woman, a model, who agreed to donate eggs to Lindberg through an anonymous process while he was in prison …
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For all its seeming manipulation and deception, not to mention its eugenicist undertones, most elements of Lindberg’s baby project were perfectly legal.
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More than a dozen experts in the fertility industry say these arrangements were extremely coercive. All of them called out the scale of the payments, in particular. “I have never heard of those kinds of numbers in this field,” says [Columbia University Fertility Center’s Briana Rudick]. To be fair, the clinics might not have been aware of the problematic millions based on the forms a given donor filled out. But the experts say bringing multiple donors and surrogates to the same clinic should have set off alarms. (Lindberg was open with doctors about wanting to have several surrogates carrying embryos to term at the same time, according to clinic workers and his former employees.) Along with the difficulty of parenting multiple infants, industry guidelines discourage this practice because it could encourage people to treat donors and surrogates as commodities. “I don’t know a single psychiatrist or doctor that would condone that,” Rudick says.
