Fertility Inc.: ‘Our Money Was Gone’

**Ryan Knutson** (0:06)
This may be a difficult thing to articulate, but why did you want to have kids so badly?

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (0:12)
Do you ever feel like there is more of yourself to give, more to love, more to explain, and there's just this constant want and need to give more? I have felt that since I met my husband.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:39)
When AnnaMaria Gallozzi met her husband, she says the topic of kids came up immediately.

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (0:46)
On our very first date, we went to a Capital's hockey game, and our first conversation after the hockey game was, so do you want kids? We knew immediately where we laid with kids, what we thought we wanted to parent like, how we wanted to raise them, what religion, all of that. We kind of fleshed out on our first date.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:06)
How many kids did you and your husband think you wanted?

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (1:10)
So, he has always been like, the perfect family is 2.5 kids. I'm like, what is a 0.5 kid? Like, what, is that a dog? Like, what is a 0.5 kid? And I'm Italian Catholic. I wanted as many kids as my body would give me.

**Podcast Host (Dominique Seid interview)** (1:24)
Really?

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (1:24)
Like, I was ready to go the distance.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:26)
Six, seven, eight, let's go for it?

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (1:27)
Yeah, let's have a full hockey team. Like, let's go.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:38)
Unfortunately for AnnaMaria, her dream of building a big family would prove much harder than she anticipated. And in order to have kids at all, she'd need help from a multi-billion dollar fertility industry. But that industry is almost entirely unregulated. And as recent legal battles and an investigation by The Wall Street Journal show, parts of the industry can also be plagued with fraud.

**Ben Foldy** (2:09)
No one is above being a victim of a financial crime. Like, it's not that anybody made a mistake here. Like, I don't know what they could have done differently.

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (2:21)
What we thought of is we would have a baby or we wouldn't have a baby. You never once think, okay, now that I've made it through all these millions of hurdles, is there money going to be there tomorrow?

**Ryan Knutson** (2:40)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Friday, March 13th. Coming up on the show, our deep dive into the fertility industry continues. Today, they wanted a baby, then their money went missing.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:17)
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**SPEAKER_6** (3:45)
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**Ryan Knutson** (4:22)
Anna Maria and her husband got married in 2017, and two years later, around the same time that they were trying to build a family, Anna Maria noticed something, a growing pain in her shoulder and chest.

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (4:34)
In October of 2019, I found a dime-sized lump in my breast that in two weeks that it turned into a golf-sized ball, I was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. Hearing that you have breast cancer, you immediately go to the worst, right?

**Ryan Knutson** (4:57)
Well, yeah, I mean, stage four, that's pretty serious.

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (5:00)
Yeah, it's normally a death sentence. And now, for the rest of my life, I go into the infusion room, and I get a chemo every three weeks.

**Ryan Knutson** (5:08)
Wow. You're gonna do chemo every three weeks for the rest of your life?

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (5:11)
The rest of my life.

**Ryan Knutson** (5:14)
The type of cancer that Anna Maria has can get worse if there's a surge of hormones, like there is during a pregnancy.

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (5:21)
My cancer being hormone receptive immediately stripped me of the ability to carry my own child.

**Ryan Knutson** (5:29)
What went through your mind when you heard that?

**AnnaMaria Gallozzi** (5:33)
That I failed my husband, who also desperately wanted to be a dad. That I failed my family. That I failed myself of a dream that I'll never get to achieve. Because not only did I want a child, I wanted to be pregnant.