A rogue fertility clinic, stolen eggs, and an unlikely friendship

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, an unlikely tale of friendship against the odds.

0:20Jenny Kleeman:I knew that this was going to be an extremely moving story, but what I hadn't realised was that in reporting what was an appalling abuse of trust, I would come away feeling so hopeful about humanity and hearing about the best of human nature and what happens when decent people trust in the goodness of each other. This is Jenny Kleeman. If you're a regular listener of Today in Focus, you will recognise her voice. Now, I am a massive Jenny Kleeman fan. If I see her name on an article, I will always read it. And one of her specialisms is investigating the Wild West that is the fertility industry.

0:58Jenny Kleeman:So this story came from another story that I wrote for The Guardian four years ago. And this is what always happens when you write stories about fertility treatment. You get sent more. And somebody got in touch with me to say that he had been conceived with stolen sperm at a clinic in California in Orange County. And he said, but you might have heard of this clinic already because there was a big scandal there because actually they were stealing eggs there too. And I looked it up and it was an outrageous story, but nobody had ever tracked down any of the children that were born. And those people would now be in their 30s and really able to advocate for themselves.

1:39Jenny Kleeman:So I began this quest to try and find these families and see if I can speak to any of the children. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus, the truly outrageous story about a fertility clinic, the women it duped and the child it produced.

2:00Jenny, this story starts with a fertility clinic. Tell me about it.

2:04Jenny Kleeman:The University of California at Irvine had a fertility clinic that was famous around the world because it offered a procedure that was known as GIFT, that's gamete intrafallopian transfer. Right. And you have to imagine the 1980s, there being this gold rush into fertility treatment. In 1978, you had the first test tube baby. Louise Brown was born. And all of a sudden... In older Manchester, wasn't it? Yes. And all of a sudden, fertility doctors could charge enormous amounts of money to make people's dreams come true. And IVF was not very successful back in those days. It had quite low success rates.

2:42Jenny Kleeman:And so people were trying crazy new things all the time. And UCI Irvine hired two South American fertility doctors, Ricardo Ash and Jose Balmaceda. Jose Balmaceda, who incidentally is the actor Pedro Pascal's father, I discovered. And these are two doctors who became famous because they were using this technique called GIFT. So instead of the baby being conceived in a test tube, as would happen in IVF or in a Petri dish, the sperm and egg are made to meet inside the human body, so inside the fallopian tubes. And at the time, it was more successful than IVF, which is why so many people were prepared to flock to this clinic to try it out.

3:23When you average all the patients in which gift is being done, about 35 % of all of them will become pregnant. If you compare that success to the success of IVF, it's practically double.

3:37Jenny Kleeman:And this was supposed to be more natural and more acceptable to Catholics because fertility treatment took place inside the human body. And Ricardo Ash was very, very ambitious and knew that there was a huge market for the world's one billion Catholics to be eligible for a particular kind of fertility treatment. So he even traveled to the Vatican to get the Pope's blessing for his treatment. But, you know, this was a world where fertility doctors could make an enormous amount of money. And Ricardo Ash had lots of sports cars. He had a red Ferrari with a number plate that said Dr Gift on it. He owned five racehorses.

4:14Jenny Kleeman:He had lots of beachfront properties. And also California was a place where, you know, the most privileged people are living, people who are used to being able to have whatever they want. So it was a kind of brave new world of what was possible and what people were prepared to pay for it. One of those women was Renee Ballou, a 30-year-old who worked in the carpet industry and lived with their husband Wesley in a beautiful house an hour outside Los Angeles. We had married, had a son who was 10 at the time. We had been trying to get pregnant since he was four. So we had gone through a lot of fertility treatments.

4:55And then Dr. Stone referred us to Dr. Ash and Dr. Balmaceda. And he said, they're amazing. They're having a wonderful success rate. And, you know, we were thrilled because we tried everything else and we've gotten, you know, you know, our marriage was, you know, kind of deteriorating, you know, after years and years of infertility. Another woman who was referred to Dr. Ash was Carol Lieber Wilkins, who was also struggling with infertility. I was diagnosed at the age of 30 with complete ovarian failure, otherwise known as menopause. There was no cause for it. We don't know why it happened. It's just that my ovaries declined actually through my 20s, but it was missed because I was so young, nobody was looking for it.

5:45And then shortly after that, I was introduced to Ricardo Ash. We had a consultation with him. He said, yeah, you're a great candidate because you're otherwise healthy, your uterus looks good. But there's a six to an 18 month wait, because there are more people like you who need eggs from other women than there are women willing to give them to you. So essentially, we got in the queue, I was put on replacement hormones, kind of indefinitely, like just waiting. But in the meantime, we were very ready to be parents. So we pursued adoption. And my son, Alex, was born. And he was five weeks old when I got a call from the clinic saying, we have a daughter for you.

6:37So come on down. In the meantime, Renee had also visited the clinic. She was impressed with Dr. Ash. And he told her that she'd be a great candidate for gift and that she would easily get pregnant. I went in and had the surgery. and after I woke up from the anesthesia he said you're pregnant and I said you know wonderful I was so thrilled that he thought that but when I got home I just did not feel like I was pregnant immediately I didn't feel like it had worked and then you know we took the test and I was not pregnant so we went for our you know post-op and you know he told me the same things again what a great candidate I would be.

7:18And, you know, I had a lot of eggs that were viable. You know, I should do it again. It just, I just had to think about it. I've been through so much for so long. He did ask me if I would consider donating any of my eggs. And I said, absolutely not. And we kind of left it at that. We needed to go home and think about if we wanted to do another a gift procedure. Renee was devastated and decided not to return to the clinic. The strain of the failed IVF took a toll on her marriage, and she and her husband divorced. She decided to put it all in the past and threw herself into work, though she began drinking heavily.

8:01For Carol, however, the procedure was a success. Unable to use her own eggs, doctors fertilized a donor egg with her husband's sperm, and she got pregnant. Yeah, I was very, very, very lucky. It worked the first time, and Daniel was born in March of 88.

8:22Then, one day in 1995, Renee received an unexpected call. I was in my house, and I got a call, and it was a reporter from the Orange County Register, and she asked me if I was there alone. And I said, no, I was not alone. My brother was there, my boyfriend. And she said, you need to get one of them and sit down. And I thought that was very strange. So I went and got my brother and I sat down and she said, we're breaking a story tomorrow. We have some records here that the FBI has released and we have every indication that your eggs were stolen and that you have a child that was born from the stolen eggs.

9:06That child was Daniel. And at least one of those eggs, Renee's eggs, had been given to Carol. Carol had been assured that the eggs had been donated freely, voluntarily by women undergoing IVF, who either couldn't use them or no longer needed them. It was a lie.

9:28How was the scandal eventually uncovered and what was the picture that started to emerge about what they had been doing behind the doors of this clinic?

9:36Jenny Kleeman:Some whistleblowers who worked within the clinic gave some documents to reporters at the Orange County Register which showed that the doctors had been taking eggs from women who were sedated, lying on the operating table, taking those eggs and giving them to other women without their knowledge or consent. And, you know, if you put this in context, some of these women never went on to have a baby. So these are women who very much wanted to have a baby, being not only physically violated, having a bit of their body taken from them in an incredibly intimate procedure, but other women went on to bear those babies.

10:14Jenny Kleeman:So it was a really, really horrific story. Thousands of couples came here looking for a miracle. What some found instead may turn into a nightmare. There were lawsuits and, you know, there were daytime talk shows. These women went on with their lawyers talking about how they'd been wronged. There was a schlocky daytime movie, you know, one of those awful kind of true crime movies that they used to make in the 90s. I wanted you to see this before it hit the streets. Some of the eggs that Dr. Ash harvested from you are missing. Some of them are fertilised. We don't exactly know how many. How big a scale was this scandal?

10:58How many people were affected?

11:00Jenny Kleeman:There are at least 137 patients who this happened to and 15 live births that we know for sure about. But nobody can really know because a lot of the records in the clinic were destroyed when Ash and Balmerceda realised they were being investigated. most of the paperwork is just gone. So these are just the ones that we know about now. So as you say, it's an incredible violation. As somebody who had three unsuccessful rounds of IVF, I can completely imagine how heartbreaking and devastating it would have been for these women. What kind of recourse did they have? Were they able to sue the clinic?

11:33What happened?

11:35Jenny Kleeman:Well, it wasn't illegal what these doctors were doing back in those days. There were no laws against using sperm or eggs without consent. How can it not be illegal? Because this is the whole thing about fertility treatment. It's a new field and legislation is slow. Yeah, I guess they just hadn't anticipated these kind of scenarios. Not at all. And I think the doctors didn't really anticipate that it would ever be uncovered because you also have to remember that back in the 80s and 90s, nobody had any idea that people would be doing DNA tests for fun and all of this stuff would be found out. So it's like, you know, got a few spare eggs, got a vial of sperm that's going to go down the sink, you might as well use it.

12:11Jenny Kleeman:I mean, it's born of a kind of patrician idea of, oh, this poor desperate woman, what she just needs is a baby. I'll just play God and make her pregnant and then that'll all be fine. She won't ask too many questions. There's this assumption that all women want is to be pregnant and they don't really care how it happened just because that's what all women want. That's the way that you'll make their dreams come true. And it's awful. It's awful. But for the most egregious cases where it could be proven that a live birth had resulted as a consequence of this, there was a level of compensation, I think it was$250 ,000 that women were able to get.

12:48Jenny Kleeman:But even then it was classed as a kind of medical malpractice, which is the same as, you know, you'd get for taking the wrong kidney. It's not the same as intentionally stealing someone's genetic material and creating a human being with it. And as well as people rightly wanting compensation from this, can you imagine that there were people who thought, well, my baby, I want my baby. There were so many people who were desperate to see their biological children. And for many of these people, their biological children were six, seven, eight, nine by the time they found out what had happened. Some people hired private investigators to track their biological children down.

13:23Jenny Kleeman:There was one couple who hired someone to secretly videotape some twins who were conceived with the woman's eggs. Parents were trying to get custody of the children, were trying to get photographs of the children. It was very frightening for the women who had given birth to these children, who were blameless, who thought that they were using donor eggs. And what happened to the doctors who were responsible for this, Pedro Pascal's dad and the other guy? So because there was so much cash washing around this clinic, there was some very dodgy accounting and almost a million dollars had kind of gone missing that tax should have been paid on.

14:00Jenny Kleeman:and hadn't been. So the doctors were eventually charged with tax evasion and fraud, but they both fled when criminal charges were filed against them. Balmer Seder went back to Chile, where he was originally from, and Ash, who's from Argentina, he moved to Mexico, where he still is, and he's practicing as a fertility doctor. A beggar's belief, doesn't it? 30 years, with his head held high. With his head held high and also he gave a TED talk in Spanish that went out in 2019, reflecting on his career, building families, talking about the gay couples who he's been able to make the dreams come true for and all of the rest and without ever remarking on the non-consensual families that he created through stealing these eggs.

14:54Jenny Kleeman:Neither of them have ever admitted culpability, although Jose Balmerceda did come back to the US in, I think, 2022 to join his very famous son. And I think he has paid fines or at least in some respect answer to the charges that were laid against him. Ricardo Ash is still at large in Mexico.

15:22Back in the 1990s, Renee had just found out from that journalist that another woman had had a baby with her eggs. That woman was Carol. And the baby, the baby Renee had so desperately wanted, was already seven years old. For Carol and her husband, the news also came as a total shock. It was a terrifying experience. Obviously, Renee was a complete unknown stranger to me. I was comforted in two ways, which was one, I kept saying, well, my husband is his genetic parent. He's living with his genetic father. And so that must mean something. So I'm sure she can't totally take him away from his father.

16:11And the second thing was at the time, the law in California was that the person who gives birth to a child is its legal mother. Because I had carried and delivered him, I knew I was the legal parent. So the expression in my head was, I know she cannot take him away from us, but she can ruin our lives trying. Carol was also terrified that if people found out it could damage her career. She worked as a therapist who helped families with donor conceived children. What really changed our lives, all of our lives, including Renee's, is that I knew several reproductive attorneys. And I called one and told him what had happened.

16:57And his first response was, lawyer up. He said, lawyer up, baby, lawyer up. And that just felt wrong to me. It just felt like it didn't fit my suit of clothes at all. But I called a second attorney. Ironically, the first one is a male and the second one was a female reproductive attorney. And the first thing she said to me was, well, Carol, what does she want? And I was sobbing and say, I don't know. I don't know what she wants. I don't know what she, you know, I don't know. And she said, well, why don't you talk to her and see what she wants? I called my ex-husband and let him know what had happened.

17:39And it was not his sperm, though. So, you know, he wasn't biologically involved. But, you know, of course, I wanted him to know. And he decided to go ahead and get an attorney. And he got Gloria Allred as our attorney. Gloria asked me, do you want to sue for custody or visitation? I'm like, you know, when I realized how old he was, I'm like, absolutely not. I mean, you don't take a six or eight-year-old and, you know, try and interrupt his life. I mean, he had a life. He had a wonderful mother and father. And there was no reason for me to try and interject in his life at all. You know, sure, I'd like to meet him someday.

18:20But as long as I know that he is safe and has a good family, you know, I felt at peace. Hi, Mom. Hi, Mom. Hi, Dwight. How can you be as big as you? Oh, well, you'll grow big pretty soon. But I'll tell you what. Why don't you take this magic pill, and maybe that will work for you. Hold on, hold on. Wait a minute. You can't take it inside. You'll grow through the roof. You better go outside and do it. I want to go outside more. I'm getting bigger. Whoa, I'm getting bigger. I'm getting bigger.

19:07So Jenny, while reporting on the aftermath of this scandal, you got to know Carol and Renee. And I think you started to realise that there's something really quite unusual happening there.

19:17Jenny Kleeman:I was just completely surprised by their relationship from the beginning. At first I was talking to Renee, because Renee was the person whose name was in the public domain. And then she said, you really should be talking to Carol as well. And I said, oh, do you think she will speak to me? Because none of the mothers who'd received the stolen eggs were speaking out. And she said, well, I'll ask her. Carol was happy for me to contact her. And then we were having these Zoom meetings together. And it was clear that they were a unit, that they came together. And they're very different people, yet they have this extraordinary relationship of respect with each other.

19:54Jenny Kleeman:I would have expected there to be at least some distance or some guardedness. And then I realized I was onto something really extraordinary here. I was onto what happens if in the most terrible of circumstances, you have two good people who choose to be decent to each other. And so how did they get to that point once the fear of a custody battle went away? How did they start to forge that friendship? So Carol used her adoption lawyer as an intermediary. And Renee used to send letters that went through this adoption. She would send it to this lawyer who would pass them on to Carol. And then eventually they spoke on the phone for the first time.

20:33Jenny Kleeman:And then after a few years, they ditched the intermediary and Carol gave Renee her real address. And Carol sent Renee photographs of Daniel and Renee sent Carol photos of herself and Daniel's half-brother, Matthew. And I was just very struck by how compassionate they were with each other, which was born out of the trust that Renee never tried to track Daniel down and Carol never withheld Daniel from her. One time Carol let me, she was I think in her kitchen and I was in my kitchen and she said, Daniel's here, do you want to say hello to him? And I was like in shock. And so I got on the phone. I just said, oh, how was school today?

21:11And I think he was playing soccer at the time or something. And I said, how was soccer? And just something you would say to an eight-year-old or wherever he was. And, you know, she had that trust in me and, you know, that I wasn't going to say, I'm your mom. And, you know, of course I wouldn't do anything like that, but she's always trusted me. And, you know, we just have always had that relationship.