Baby=Selling Ring Busted in San Diego

From the FBI's website, a guilty plea by a surrogacy attorney who used gestational surrogates to "create an inventory" of babies offered to prospective parents who were told other parents had backed out of the surrogacy arrangement -- and then the attorney lied to the courts to avoid having to have the prospective parents adopt the infants, all to the tune of $100,000 per:

United States Attorney Laura E. Duffy announced today that Theresa Erickson entered a guilty plea before United States Magistrate Judge William McCurine, Jr., in which she admitted to being part of a baby-selling ring that deceived the Superior Court of California and prospective parents for unborn babies. According to court records, Erickson (an internationally renowned California attorney specializing in reproductive law) fraudulently submitted false declarations and pleadings to the California Superior Court in San Diego, in order to obtain pre-birth judgments establishing parental rights for Intended Parents (“IPs”). California law forbids the sale of parental rights to babies and children but permits surrogacy arrangements if the women expecting to carry the babies, Gestational Carriers (“GCs”), and the IPs enter into an agreement prior to an embryonic transfer. If the GC and IPs do not reach an agreement before the GC receives the embryonic transfer, the GC cannot transfer parental rights except through a formal adoption procedure.

In her guilty plea, Erickson admitted that she and her conspirators used GCs to create an inventory of unborn babies that they would sell for over $100,000 each. They accomplished this by paying women to become implanted with embryos in overseas clinics. If the women (now GCs) sustained their pregnancies into the second trimester, the conspirators offered the babies to prospective parents by falsely representing that the unborn babies were the result of legitimate surrogacy arrangements, but that the original IPs had backed out. In pleading guilty, Erickson also admitted that she prepared and filed with the Superior Court of California, County of San Diego, declarations and pleadings that falsely represented that the unborn babies were the products of legitimate surrogacy agreements.