FLORISSANT, Mo. — Two weeks ago, Ashley and Kwasi Oyirifi got an email.
The Florissant, Missouri, couple, after years of struggling to start a family, were finally on their way. The surrogate they had found to carry their baby was pregnant. And they had deposited tens of thousands of dollars with a Houston firm to safeguard the money that would be paid to her.
Then came the note from the firm: “All operations have been placed on hold,” it read.
The Oyirifis called, but the phones were off. Social media was shut down. And payments, the couple realized, weren't being made.
They quickly discovered there could be hundreds of other families in the same position.
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Kwasi and Ashley Oyirifi hold a sonogram of their daughter, who is being carried by a surrogate in Wisconsin, at their home in Florissant on Tuesday, June 25, 2024.
Authorities in Houston have confirmed they are investigating Surrogacy Escrow Account Management, known as SEAM, after dozens of complaints.
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"My phone hasn't stopped ringing," said Houston police Officer William Wright, who got his first call from a SEAM client June 16.
Houston police Sgt. Chad Long, the supervisor of the department's financial crimes unit, said in an email Monday that more than 30 people had contacted them, and the FBI would be leading the investigation "due to the size and wide territory in which the victims are coming from."
Madeline Sieren, a spokesperson for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office, said that it had received three complaints about SEAM, which were under review. The Texas Attorney General’s Office did not respond to questions about how many complaints it had or whether it is investigating.
Dominique Side, the owner of SEAM, could not be reached for comment.
SEAM's clients, however, are mobilizing: A Facebook group called SEAM Breach formed this month and has more than 750 members. They are sharing ideas on how to file complaints, rewrite contracts and fundraise to replace their money.
For families like the Oyirifis, who were finally emerging from the physical and emotional turmoil of infertility, it feels like the ground is giving way, again.
“Our journey is quite a saga,” said Ashley Oyirifi. “This was supposed to be our happy ending.”
Their baby, due in November, will come home from the hospital with them. That, they know.
Everything else is a question mark — including how much more they're now going to have to pay.
Millions could be held up
Gestational surrogacy, when a woman carries a baby that she has no biological link to, is a rare but growing path to parenthood. In 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. fertility clinics reported 727 embryo transfers to gestational carriers. Twenty years later, that number was almost 10,000.
The global surrogacy market was valued at just under $15 billion last year and is expected to climb to almost $100 billion by 2033, according to Spherical Insights, a market research firm.
The surrogacy process is a maze of legal and medical hurdles, with regulations varying by state. The intended parents find a surrogate match, either through an agency or on their own. Lawyers are hired. Contracts are drawn up. Rounds of medical and psychological tests follow.
The costs can easily climb past $100,000. Almost always, the money that will be paid to the surrogate flows through an escrow firm.
SEAM is one of only about a half-dozen such “third-party reproduction” escrow firms in the United States. It draws clients from across the country and overseas.
Escrow ensures that before an embryo is implanted, the intended parents have their funding in place. The firm interprets the contract, paying out an agreed-upon monthly fee, plus reimbursements for medical expenses and other incidentals, like maternity clothing.
“It’s meant to protect both parties,” said Joanna Beck Wilkinson, a St. Louis lawyer who specializes in family building.
Beck Wilkinson has multiple clients around the country with money tied up in SEAM. The burden falls to them to come up with the payments if SEAM is insolvent, she said.
No one knows how many people are affected or when a resolution will come. Posts in the Facebook group suggest the total amount the escrow firm held could be in the millions, said Beck Wilkinson.
“We have very little verifiable information,” she said.
'Ready to give up'
Surrogacy is almost never a Plan A. The decision to turn to a gestational carrier often comes after years of heartache: failed fertility treatments, miscarriages, stillbirths.
Arielle Mitton of Bellingham, Washington, had been through nearly every type of medical intervention. Her uterus is filled with scar tissue.
She and her husband decided to try surrogacy, but that had its own difficulties. Finding the right connection is a little like online dating.
At one point, “I was sort of ready to give up,” Mitton said.
In November, though, the couple Zoomed with a woman in Rosedale, Indiana. Right away, they knew it would work. They signed a contract in March, and the Mittons deposited about $50,000 into their SEAM account.
Their surrogate, Tena Doan, has four children of her own but had always thought of carrying a baby for someone else. On April 8, the embryo from the Mittons was implanted.
The first trimester was rough on Doan, whose morning sickness stretched into the night. Every day, she had to give herself multiple shots of estrogen and progesterone.
“You are giving up a lot to do this,” said Doan, who is a server at Outback Steakhouse. She had earmarked her fees for renovation work on her home.
Still, she didn’t think much of it when SEAM missed a payment on June 1. But when the emails went out, and word spread among other account-holders, the gravity of the situation became apparent.
Doan and the Mittons will likely need to hammer out a new contract, perhaps for smaller payments over a longer period. The Mittons took out a loan to pay SEAM; they, like others, have set up a GoFundMe to help.
Doan will need to take off work after she delivers the baby, due on Christmas Eve, and now she is unsure of whether she will have a financial cushion to cover that. She’s picking up extra shifts at the restaurant when she can.
Mitton doesn’t want Doan to stress. Doan doesn’t want Mitton to worry. They are in this together.
“It is heartbreaking,” said Doan. “Someone has basically robbed us.”
‘Just middle-class people’
Ashley and Kwasi Oyirifi, the couple from Missouri, met as students at the University of Missouri-Columbia. They knew they wanted a family with biological and adopted children.
After trying to get pregnant for a year and a half, the couple underwent in vitro fertilization. The first embryo transfer was successful, and they decided to relocate to St. Louis from central Illinois to be closer to their parents.
Just before the move, at 19 weeks' pregnant, Ashley Oyirifi gave birth to a daughter, Averi. She did not survive.
Four more embryo transfers didn’t take. So, in late 2022, the Oyirifis looked into surrogacy.
“I spent hours and hours learning about it,” Ashley Oyirifi said.
They found their first potential surrogate through a Facebook group called Surrogates and IPs Match, but she ended up backing out.
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Ashley and Kwasi Oyirifi eat dinner with their foster son at their home in Florissant on Tuesday, June 25, 2024.
Late last summer, around the same time they were welcoming a 5-month-old foster child into their home, they met a woman from Wisconsin who said she would carry their baby. The surrogate planned to use the money she would make to pay off student loans.
Finally, the pieces were falling into place, the Oyirifis thought.
They scraped together $65,000 and sent it to SEAM in January.
“We’re just middle-class people,” said Ashley Oyirifi. “It was a major sacrifice for us.”
In February, an embryo was successfully transferred into their surrogate.
The Oyirifis exhaled. Their foster baby, too, was on his way to becoming a permanent member of the family. His adoption is set to be finalized in early fall.
Then, a couple weeks ago, the sledgehammer fell. They had close to $50,000 left in the SEAM account when they got the email.
They were able to scrounge up their surrogate’s payment for this month, but they have six yet to come.
“We’ll feel this for a few years,” said Ashley Oyirifi.
She wants things to go back to normal, to concentrate on their to-do list, the same as any soon-to-be parents: whittling down a list of names, decorating the nursery, stocking up on diapers.
“I love the feeling of being a mom,” she said. “I don’t want this to be the storyline when we think of our son or daughter getting here.”
Is your screen time tanking your sperm count? A urologist explains new study results
Is your screen time tanking your sperm count? A urologist explains new study results
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It's hardly a secret that spending significant amounts of time on your phone can do a number on your health—both mental and physical. Studies have already shown that extended screen time can cause eye strain, exacerbate anxiety and wreak havoc on sleep patterns. As if that weren't enough, a new study seems to suggest that prolonged cell phone use might also be associated with reduced sperm count.
The study, conducted by researchers from universities and health organizations in Switzerland, sounds very worrying at first glance: 2,886 young men from the general Swiss population were recruited to answer questions about their lifestyles and deliver semen samples for assessment. Hims reports that the respondents who used their phone more than 20 times per day had a 30% increased risk for lower sperm concentration and 21% increased risk for total sperm count to be below the World Health Organization's reference values for fertile men.
So does that mean you should run out and get a landline if you're concerned about your fertility? Probably not.
It's already known in the field that human sperm count appears to have fallen over the last several decades. And despite some concerning headlines about the findings, this new study doesn't really shed a ton of light on possible reasons for the overall decline. One major reason for that gap in relevant clinical conclusions is that the decades-long decline in global sperm count actually isn't all that significant when considering individual health outcomes.
It is an important trend to observe when thinking about humanity overall, but there often isn't much difference in the average semen quality across a population of fertile men and the average across a population of infertile men. Put differently, if one person has the average sperm quality and concentration from 50 years ago and another has the average sperm quality and concentration seen today, both of them would be expected to have pretty normal fertility.
To better contextualize the study, it's important to understand the different factors that affect how male infertility is assessed. Generally, the parameters measured when doing semen analysis fall into a few categories.
The first, which can be thought of as a numerical value, is sperm count. To get that value, two different variables are multiplied: sperm concentration—the number of sperm per millimeter of semen—and semen volume, which is exactly what it sounds like.
The second category can be thought of as sperm quality, the visually identifiable characteristics that lab techs and doctors believed to be correlated with functional ability to find and fertilize an egg in the female reproductive tract. When sperm quality is referenced, what often is being evaluated is sperm motility, the percentage of sperm that are moving progressively; and sperm morphology, the percentage of sperm with a perfect shape.
A lot needs to happen for natural conception to occur, and it's often not helpful to isolate any of these numbers without considering the full range of individual and environmental factors that shape a person's health.
Similarly, trying to determine the factors leading to a global decline in sperm count is far from an exact science, and the study's focus on cell phone usage might be obscuring more than it reveals.
A major reason for that is the simple fact of how much life has changed in the years since the study first began evaluating respondents. The average person now uses their phone far, far more than was common in 2005. But that's not the only widely observed change in lifestyle.
There are so many confounding variables that might affect someone's sexual health: People are, on average, leading more sedentary lives than they were in the mid-20th century. While it's true that increased phone usage is often a consistent feature of sedentary lifestyles, there are many other associated factors that could also be affecting sperm quality. Consider, for example, how much more likely you are to be on your phone when you're feeling depressed or skipping exercise. Common contributors to other adverse health outcomes, such as obesity, smoking and binge drinking, can all decrease sperm quality.
For men who are concerned about their sperm quality or concentration, knowing that these factors all play into fertility might be a lot more helpful than just blindly trying to avoid cell phone usage, especially since the study found no correlation between keeping a phone in your pocket and having lower semen parameters.
There are a number of other things you can do to try improving fertility before heading into a doctor's office, such as focusing on maintaining a nutritious diet, exercising, tending to your mental health and avoiding both binge drinking and smoking. There's even data that suggests wearing boxers is better than tight underwear for maintaining proper testicular temperatures.
And of course, if you and a female partner have been having difficulty conceiving after about six months to a year, it's really important to go see a doctor. Men are an important part of the reproductive equation—they cause or contribute to about half of all infertility cases, and being aware that they matter is a huge first step in addressing any concern. The best way to take action at that point is to see a urologist or get a semen analysis, which your doctor can order in-office or recommend an at-home kit.
This story was produced by Hims and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.
Is your screen time tanking your sperm count? A urologist explains new study results
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