Lilly Frost, aka Lillian Arielle Markowitz, aka Lillian Arevalo, aka Lillian Revalo, was recently sentenced to two years in prison “for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from her clients.” Frost ran a surrogacy racketeering ring that reportedly included a Mexican surrogate giving birth in the street, babies abandoned because of health problems, a woman inseminated with an HIV-positive embryo, and a surrogate told to “keep it inside” after the baby died at six months — a virtual death sentence.
It’s some of the most disturbing headlines to come out of the reproductive tech world. I should know. As one of the most public-facing activists fighting Big Fertility abuses, I’ve been getting daily “surrogacy” Google alerts for close to a decade. In addition to defrauding intended parents, Frost victimized countless women and children.
She is also my (kind-of) stepsister.
I say “kind of” because in the world of adult cohabitation, relationships are definitionally nebulous. Are we sisters? Are we friends? Are you stealing my dad/mom away? Or in the case of brothers, are we stepsiblings and/or did you mean to brush against my boob during that hug? There’s rarely a uniform category for these relationships.
When it comes to my backstory, my standard talking point is, “My parents divorced when I was 10. My mother repartnered with a woman. My father dated and remarried.” I keep things simple so my parents can share their portion of our story if, how, and when they want. But also because my child-defense work is not fueled by some sort of personal axe to grind. It’s not. My parents navigated the post-divorce landscape as well as they could and as genuine friends. They stayed emotionally connected to me and didn’t allow their romantic interests to parent me.
That’s not to say I don’t understand the effects of family breakdown, specifically divorce, and the upheaval to a child’s life that new partners or spouses can introduce to their lives. I do. Not just because I lived it, but because I lived with other kids who lived it.
Arielle, as I knew her then, was one of them.
Three years old at the time, she was the daughter of the first woman my father dated. And by dated, I mean cohabited with. When I lived with my father, I lived with her and her mother. In my middle school years, she was like a little sister — one who got to live with my father full-time, even though I did not. If she had a relationship with her own father, it wasn’t enough for her to have extended times away from her mom.
I don’t have many memories of her, mostly because it was long ago, and I was only there half the time. But I do remember overnight sailing trips together, once when Arielle had an ear infection so bad we had to motor back to the marina at 2 a.m. She would play with my kitten, Ramie, when I was at my mom’s house. One time, I helped give her a bath and used too much conditioner, to her mother’s loud disappointment.
After our parents broke up in my early high school years, we didn’t see them anymore. As someone who now chronicles the stories of children who experience family breakdown, that’s kind of how the remarriage/cohabiting gig works. “Hey, kids, we’re a family now!” “Never mind, they mean nothing to us.”
Arielle and I lost contact, as 7-year-olds don’t have the power or agency to maintain their own familial relationships (the very reason adults must defend children’s rights to their mother and father). She did pop up in her late teens on my mother’s doorstep, pregnant and needing help. She went to my mother because my mom helps everyone, and somehow she knew that.
Decades passed. Then via the magic of social media, her mother found me on Facebook and wanted to reconnect. This sometimes happens with kids whose parents have dated after they were born. The previous boyfriend or girlfriend reaches out and wants to revisit a stop on their journey to self-fulfillment. For the kids, it was often a time of complexity, competition, or even emotional collapse. After pleasantries were exchanged, I asked about Arielle. Her mom bubbled (as unaware as the rest of the world to the human rights violations taking place) that her daughter was now running a booming fertility business, making family dreams come true.
“And what are you up to, Katy?”
“I fight against everything Arielle is making money off of.” And thereby ended the conversation with my father’s first girlfriend.
When news broke two years ago of the Ponzi scheme Arielle had allegedly orchestrated, I was stunned and sad, of course — and told my mother under no circumstances should she be sucked into any pleas for help. I also marveled at how two similarly situated kind-of stepsisters could head in polar opposite directions — one profiting off child commodification, the other working to obstruct it at every turn.
Was it because I benefited from sharing one home with my mother and father for the first 10 years of my life? Was it their healthy emotional circle that kept me in but largely kept unrelated adults appropriately out? Or was it simply the biblical ethic of protection for the least of these that slowly seeped into my consciousness after I became a Christian in high school? Most likely, all of the above.
Lots of kids grow up in (un)merry-go-round, cohabiting homes and don’t turn into greedy baby-sellers. But as we often discuss at Them Before Us, children need to be nourished by three socio/emotional staples as they grow: Mother’s love, Father’s love, and stability. As far as I can tell, Arielle got one of them — Mother’s love — and that’s it. Maybe there were other good stepfather figures in her life here or there, I don’t know. But she sure as hell didn’t get stability. She was emotionally malnourished, and that resulted in unsurprising dysfunction.
When authorities finally located her, Arielle had lost her marriage and had reportedly overdosed on ketamine and fentanyl. She owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to the intended parents she defrauded. Even worse, she very likely passed children into the hands of predators, commercially severed many from their genetic parents, and profited off of the primal wounds that babies experience when they lose their birth mother. The truth is, that’s all routine in the world of Big Fertility. Arielle just stole money too, and that’s what landed her in prison.
I sent Arielle a Facebook message last week that she may never read. I told her I’m praying for her. Those prayers involve healing and redeeming childhood wounds, even while behind bars.
We are raising a generation of children who are experiencing family breakdown on a mass scale, not due to tragedy but because of adult intentionality. Adult desire, identity, feelings, and romantic pursuits have been elevated above the fundamental right of children to be known and loved by their own mother and father. Some of these kids will recognize that brokenness and work to reverse it. Many will be so damaged they will perpetuate the cycle in their personal lives … or their professional lives.
The Federalist
Jesus Christ is King
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