MaryBeth Lewis was shopping for groceries at her local Walmart in suburban Buffalo when she got the word: Her surrogate had just been induced. She rushed home and packed a bag for her new twins — a book for baby footprints, matching outfits and beanies and blankets embroidered with their names. Then she jumped back in the car and raced down Interstate 390 to a small hospital 130 miles away in a rural corner of the state.
When MaryBeth arrived at the maternity ward, she found her surrogate in a recovery room, tired but happy after a quick delivery. She asked to see the twins, and a nurse went to go find them. But before she returned, a different woman dressed in scrubs appeared and got in MaryBeth’s face. “What you did was terrible,” the woman said. “You will never see these babies.” MaryBeth tried to talk to her, but the woman refused to listen. A voice over the loudspeaker announced that visiting hours were over. “And that means you,” the woman said.
In the hospital parking lot, MaryBeth sat in her car and cried. “I’m thinking, What the hell did I do to have somebody say this to me?”
MaryBeth loves children. She always has. When she was a little girl, she had a routine. Every night, she gathered up her sisters’ dolls in the corner of the living room. Her mother would stand in the doorway and smile as MaryBeth sang them lullabies and tucked in each of the 10 babies with small pillows and blankets.
MaryBeth was 25 when she married a pilot named Bob Lewis. The couple had five daughters. When the girls neared adulthood and empty-nest syndrome kicked in, MaryBeth wanted more children. In her late 40s, she used in vitro fertilization to give birth to twin girls. And she wasn’t done. Despite medical mishaps, miscarriages and raised eyebrows from friends, she kept going, and going, eventually giving birth to her 13th child at the remarkable age of 62.
But to bring this last set of twins into the world, MaryBeth went further — she tricked an I.V.F. clinic, a judge and even her own husband. These deceptions left MaryBeth, who is now 68, potentially facing a yearslong prison sentence. She has lost her job and is barred from her children’s school. She has dropped nearly 70 pounds from the stress and cries herself to sleep at night. Over two years, MaryBeth has spent more than $500,000 fighting for her freedom and for custody of the twins who she maintains are her 14th and 15th children.
This spring, MaryBeth met me at a Tim Hortons near her home in Elma, N.Y., the same one where she buys doughnuts to decorate with frosting and googly eyes for children’s parties. It had been a long day. She left a new job early that afternoon to take her three youngest to the dentist, just one of the many appointments that fill her pocket planner. As the sun went down, the temperature outside dropped, and the ceiling vents exhaled sleepy, stale air. But MaryBeth was still buzzing with energy. She flashed a warm smile, as if greeting her son on the sideline of a soccer game with a bag of orange slices. After ordering a Diet Coke and finding a table, this ordinary woman sat down to explain her extraordinary legal troubles.
“I felt bad, definitely,” MaryBeth said. “I felt bad because I did not feel good with what I did.” She drummed her nails on the table, and the sentiment she broadcast was less guilt than impatience. Finally, her frustration bubbled over. “This is bullcrap!” she said in a nasal Buffalo accent. “For what I did to get all these fricking felonies.”
MaryBeth met Bob at a St. Patrick’s Day party in 1982, when she was a young nurse in the Air Force. He looked handsome in his green flight suit. She scribbled down her number. “After a while I thought, Well, why isn’t this guy calling me?” she says. MaryBeth called every Robert Lewis in the phone book until she found him. They married and joked that they would have a big family one day — maybe even 10 kids.
Over the next decade, MaryBeth and Bob had their first five children, all girls. They bounced around the country as the Air Force sent him from California to Oklahoma to Texas to New Jersey to Tennessee. In 1998, Bob took a lucrative pilot job at FedEx, and the family moved back to Elma, near where MaryBeth grew up, and into a huge six-bedroom house they built for themselves in an affluent subdivision called Buffalo Creek Estates.
The family now had plenty of money, but MaryBeth stuck to simple pleasures: trips to the aquarium and the zoo, volunteering at the 4-H Club, ice-cream treats at Kone King and Catholic Mass on Sundays. Every Memorial Day, she made an American-flag cake decorated with strawberries and blueberries. She continued working as a nurse, favored sensible blouses and silver earrings and sang along to Jimmy Buffett and Kenny Chesney in her minivan. MaryBeth was just a perfectly normal mother.
But something felt off. Bob was traveling half the month, and the girls were at school or busy with homework and friends. MaryBeth was often all alone in a quiet house. “This is empty,” she thought. “I don’t like this at all.” Now in her mid-40s, MaryBeth decided she wanted another baby.
‘I did not feel good with what I did.’
So MaryBeth and Bob started trying again. Months passed, then years, with no success. She was determined, and the couple eventually “went into the infertility stuff” and created a batch of embryos through I.V.F. Many clinics will not implant embryos in women older than 45, but they found a chain called CNY Fertility that did not have an age limit.
In 2007, three weeks before her 50th birthday, MaryBeth gave birth to twin girls. The delivery almost killed her — she developed a rare blood-clotting disorder, required 21 units of blood and woke up on a ventilator. The doctors said it was a miracle she survived. But the babies were here, joining their older sisters who ranged in age from 13 to 23. MaryBeth was elated.
Soon MaryBeth was pregnant again. In 2010, she gave birth to another daughter, her eighth. The East Aurora Advertiser, a Buffalo-area paper, ran a feature about the growing family. “Will there be any more little Lewises?” the reporter asked MaryBeth. She laughed. “No,” she said. “I have my hands full with these munchkins.”
MaryBeth reveled in her second chance to be a mother of young kids. “I’m not one to just sit there,” she says. “I like to go, go, go.” She sold Thin Mints and Samoas for the local Girl Scout troop and choreographed elaborate Halloween parties. She raised great kids: Her oldest five daughters, who jokingly called themselves the Originals, collected graduate degrees and high-paying jobs; the younger ones later racked up academic scholarships and athletics trophies.
Friends marveled at her stamina. MaryBeth’s calendar again filled with doctors’ appointments, gymnastics classes and birthday parties. In her free time, she somehow earned a doctorate in nursing. Bob was still gone more than two weeks a month. She didn’t care. When waitresses mistook her for Grandma, she just laughed. She was happy.
Some of MaryBeth’s family members think she would have stopped there if her mother hadn’t died unexpectedly of a stroke in 2010. They had been inseparable. MaryBeth saw her at least four times a week and even fixed up a spare bedroom for her to move into when she became too frail to live alone. “My mom was my hero,” MaryBeth says. “She was an awesome lady. Always gave of herself. Kind. Gentle. Did everything for everybody else.” MaryBeth tried to follow in her footsteps as a parent. Her death was devastating.
“I remember her calling me on the phone,” her friend Megan Eberl says. “She’s driving around aimlessly, just sobbing her eyes out.” MaryBeth saw a therapist and briefly had a prescription for Zoloft, the only mental-health issue that social-services investigators later reported finding.
That grief, her family now speculates, created a void in MaryBeth. Despite what she told The Advertiser, MaryBeth decided to implant more embryos. In 2012, at 55, she gave birth to twin boys — her ninth and 10th children. As she was being sewn up in the delivery room, a nurse rolled the bassinet into the hallway, and MaryBeth heard the Lewis girls scream with joy as they met their new brothers.
MaryBeth still brimmed with energy. But as more children arrived, she needed help, and she leaned on her adult daughters. They obliged — and also began to worry. “We could never be 100 percent sure she was done having kids,” says Liz, her third daughter. “Because she’d say she was done, and then she’d be like, ‘Surprise!’”
The Originals figured that finally giving birth to boys was the capstone. “We just were like, ‘Oh, OK, that’s our family, that’s it,’” says Marissa, her fifth daughter. MaryBeth now had the 10 kids she and Bob once joked they’d have.
But the hole in MaryBeth’s heart was about to widen. Her second daughter, Kristina, had bipolar disorder and struggled with alcohol addiction. MaryBeth took home-cooked meals to her apartment and showered her with attention. Kristina in turn texted and called MaryBeth throughout the day, the only adult daughter who kept tugging at her apron strings. “Her and I were very, very close,” MaryBeth says. “Very close.”
One night in 2013, MaryBeth came home from dinner and found Kristina — who was then 26, sober and staying at the house while recuperating from an illness — passed out and unresponsive after a heart attack. MaryBeth performed CPR and revived her until the ambulance arrived. At the hospital, the doctor had shattering news. He showed MaryBeth a normal EEG and then an image of Kristina’s brain, which revealed significantly decreased activity.
But MaryBeth refused to give up hope. The family paid $80,000 to fly Kristina on a medevac plane to San Diego and then transport her via ambulance to Tijuana, Mexico, for experimental stem-cell treatment. The procedure led to little improvement, and she returned to a care facility in Buffalo. Doctors placed a stoma in her windpipe that allowed her to breathe. Her teeth ground down, and she contorted from seizures. For years, MaryBeth visited several times a week to paint her nails, pray the rosary and report family updates in her sing-song voice.
Kristina’s incapacitation “kinda broke her,” Liz says. “And she just needed to share her mother’s love with as many children as possible.” A newborn was the promise, says her seventh daughter, Isabelle, of “someone who wouldn’t leave her.” (Isabelle, Liz and Marissa requested to use their middle names to protect their privacy.)
They were yet more theories conjured by friends and family to explain why MaryBeth kept wanting more kids. Bob was sure the children made her feel young. Her friends saw a fear of loneliness — which she kept at bay with the intoxication of new motherhood. “Nothing’s better than a baby cuddling you in bed,” Eberl says.
MaryBeth insists that it’s simpler than all that. Her childhood ritual with the dolls had grown into an existential purpose. “I think it’s because that’s where I got my love,” she says. “My children were my love, my blessings.” When Kristina died years later, a line in MaryBeth’s eulogy summed it up: “It was through her eyes that I was able to experience the innocence and splendor of life.”
‘We could never be 100 percent sure she was done having kids.’
In 2016, MaryBeth wanted another baby, but she was out of embryos. She bought donor sperm and donor eggs and created a fresh batch. The children would not be genetically related to MaryBeth or Bob, but that didn’t bother her. She would carry them herself and raise them as Lewises. She now worked at an OB-GYN clinic. Women 20 years her junior who were struggling to conceive looked on with shock when MaryBeth’s swollen belly greeted them in the exam room.
That December, MaryBeth gave birth to her third set of twins, the family’s 11th and 12th children. The new mother was 59.
Even before her midlife journey into I.V.F., MaryBeth was already an outlier: Just 5 percent of American women have five or more children. But as she gave birth again and again, she joined an even smaller circle: Only 1,200 American women in their 50s gave birth in 2023, the most recent year for which statistics are available. And most of those women were on the younger side of the decade. The federal government doesn’t publish birth statistics for women beyond the 50-54 age bracket. MaryBeth was pushing the furthest reaches of geriatric motherhood.
MaryBeth’s friends started asking more questions. For years they had congratulated her with each new pregnancy, even as their own lives transitioned to doting on grandchildren and preparing to retire. “That’s what she wanted, and that’s what made her happy,” her friend Rita DeLotto says. But now their curiosity and alarm mounted. “If she’s that staunch of a Catholic, then if God was done having her have babies naturally, why not stop, rather than go this route of fertilizing?” asks her friend Mona Meagher. (The Catholic Church officially opposes I.V.F.) “Sometimes you get lonely,” MaryBeth once explained to Megan Eberl’s husband. He darkly joked: “Then have an affair.”
On Easter morning in 2019, MaryBeth and Bob gathered 11 of their 12 children in the foyer of their home. (Kristina was still in a care facility.) MaryBeth handed each of them a plastic egg. The Lewis children ranged in age from 2 to 35. When they cracked open the plastic, they all found the same note: “WE’RE EGG-SPECTING.”
“I was really confused,” Marissa says. Was Pepper, the family’s goldendoodle, pregnant? No. MaryBeth, then 62, was carrying her 13th child.
“All of us were shocked,” says Isabelle, who was 12 at the time. “The younger ones were excited. Us older ones were like, ‘This is not going to end well.’”
Liz, then 31, was furious. For the Originals, the arrival of more siblings had gone from a joy to a stretch and finally to the breaking point. She felt increasingly pushed aside. Her sister Marissa had it worse: She lived at home during college to help with day care pickups, bath time and nighttime tears — and promptly failed her classes. A few of the older sisters even delayed having their own children in part to help MaryBeth. And now she had gone and unilaterally signed them all up for another tour of diaper duty.
“What if you pass away before you think you will?” Liz asked MaryBeth, probing her mother’s awareness of her own mortality.
“Well,” MaryBeth shot back, “what if you pass away?”
Liz stormed upstairs, packed her bags and left before Easter dinner.
Liz related this story to me with still-raw bitterness. But she followed up with a text message: Last winter, when Liz’s toddler was sick, MaryBeth dropped everything to meet them at an urgent-care clinic, went home to pack an overnight bag for the hospital, stayed with them in the emergency department, drove them home and then drove back to the hospital to retrieve something Liz had dropped in the parking lot. It was just one example of how far MaryBeth will go for her kids. “She’s not perfect, but none of us are,” Liz wrote. “She really, truly is a wonderful mom and human being.” MaryBeth is the kind of person who seeks forgiveness, not permission, and her children almost always oblige.
In the foyer, some of the children looked to Bob for guidance. He shrugged, with eyes that seemed to say, “What are you gonna do?”
In fact, the pregnancy surprised him too. MaryBeth had gone behind his back and secretly implanted two more embryos, with one taking. She had waited (and waited) until he was in a good mood, finally telling him at 12 weeks. “He originally signed for all this stuff,” she says, citing Bob’s purchase of the embryos three years earlier as tantamount to his consent. “But he wasn’t thrilled, let me put it that way.”
Where was Bob Lewis in all this? It’s the question that a county court, social workers and MaryBeth’s own defense attorneys would like to know.
Bob is a self-contained man. He is trim and balding, with watery blue eyes and a walrus mustache. Whether he’s waiting for a court hearing to begin or a server to bring the check, Bob folds his hands in his lap and tilts his chin skyward in prayerful forbearance. He had the same cool demeanor for thousands of hours in the cockpit of a C-141 cargo plane, ferrying troops overseas and bringing them home in flag-draped coffins. He kept that composure for an additional 22 years flying FedEx jets, slipping through inky black skies, waiting for runway lights to appear through the clouds.
Marriage is a series of compromises — with your spouse and with yourself — and MaryBeth and Bob’s relationship was no different. She got 13 kids and a stream of little snuggle buddies in their California-king bed. “Whatever MaryBeth wants,” Bob once told Megan Eberl, “you can see MaryBeth gets.”
But Bob the introvert had gotten what he wanted too. Weeks at a time on the road in the monastic silence of the cockpit. Solo snaps of himself in front of the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower and the Acropolis. Nights at five-star hotels around the world, grazing at buffets and drinking beers, watching “movies with swearing” in beds with crisp sheets. A full family that required only part-time parenting.
And for years it worked. Their marriage was the envy of friends. “Once, he came in from a trip — he still had an overcoat on — and changed a diaper,” Mona Meagher says. “Oh, my gosh, what a guy! Didn’t even take his coat off!”
But over time, even the occasional intersection of their parallel lives was too much to bear. The house in Buffalo Creek overflowed with kids’ toys, two refrigerators, two chest freezers and sneakers tumbling off a five-tier shoe rack. When Bob came home, he would shout and belittle MaryBeth about the mess.
“My friends, oh, years ago, told me, ‘You need to get rid of him,’” MaryBeth says. She even consulted a divorce attorney. “But then he would leave on a trip, and everything was perfect without him.”
In 2020, when the pandemic hit, the bargain stopped working entirely. On the road, Bob was quarantined in foreign hotel rooms, trays of room service left outside his door. Back home, the county school system shut down, and the Lewis kids attended virtual classes. That November, Bob turned 65, the age at which commercial pilots must legally retire.
Bob adored the kids, including his surprise youngest daughter. But he wanted to spend his golden years traveling with MaryBeth. Instead, he was home-schooling five of his eight young children through a pandemic. “I didn’t retire to become a teacher,” Bob told her.
And then in 2022, as the worst of the pandemic lifted, MaryBeth turned 65 — and felt a familiar urge.
The Lewises were still paying $50 a month to keep their last few embryos frozen at CNY Fertility in Syracuse. If born, those children would not be genetically related to MaryBeth and Bob, but they would be the full siblings of their three youngest children, as they all came from the same I.V.F. batch. It was easy for MaryBeth to imagine the sunny, bright kids these clusters of cells could become.
‘All of us were shocked. The younger ones were excited. Us older ones were like, “This is not going to end well.”’
Even couples who do not believe that an embryo is a human life can be uneasy about its destruction. Many pay the monthly fee to put off making a decision. And MaryBeth was a practicing Catholic. To remove them from liquid nitrogen and discard them, she felt, would be almost tantamount to murder.
MaryBeth visited her OB-GYN and asked about implanting two more embryos. The uterine scar from her six C-sections was paper thin. Another pregnancy could rupture it and kill her. The doctor was adamant: No more babies.
MaryBeth says Bob opposed donating the embryos to another couple because he didn’t want the genetic siblings of their three youngest children to be raised by strangers. (He doesn’t recall saying this but admits he has a bad memory.)
Because she couldn’t carry the embryos herself and wouldn’t give them away, MaryBeth says she had no choice. The only way to bring the children into the world was to use a surrogate. She contacted Rite Options, a surrogacy agency, which soon located a young woman in Steuben County who was interested in being a gestational carrier. MaryBeth also hired a New Jersey-based reproductive attorney named Melissa B. Brisman, whose professional letterhead was topped with the silhouette of a crawling baby, to handle the surrogacy contract.
If implantation was successful, the costs would be staggering. MaryBeth and Bob would pay $49,000 to the surrogate (plus a $7,000 bonus if two heartbeats were detected); cover her health and life insurance and attorney fees; pay a $3,500 hazard bonus if she required a C-section; and pay $200 a week for breast milk. All in, the process would cost more than $160,000.
The Lewises could afford it. In retirement, Bob took in $200,000 a year from two pensions and Social Security. MaryBeth still earned $92,000 a year as a nurse practitioner. They had $2 million in a 401(k) account.
MaryBeth says Bob initially went along with the surrogacy plan. (He denies this.) Whatever Bob knew, he soon staked out a definite position: 13 kids were enough. His fellow retired FedEx pilots were on fishing boats in Florida; Bob still packed school lunches. He had a familiarity with cartoons like “Bluey” and “Cocomelon” better suited to a father half his age. The Lewises’ garage was a thicket of car seats, swim floaties and strollers. A party sign hung above the mess, mocking Bob: “HAPPY RETIREMENT.” Grandchildren were now arriving, and their third daughter, Liz, was considering having a child on her own. Bob and MaryBeth had promised to shower her with support if she did.
In their kitchen one evening, MaryBeth again brought up the embryos. Bob lost it. He screamed at MaryBeth, just inches from her face. “Destroy them!” he cried. “I don’t want to do anything with them!” Bob stormed off.
“That’s when I got a little bonko,” she says.
MaryBeth can justify what came next. “This goes against my religious beliefs,” she wrote in her journal of the embryos’ potential destruction. “We have gone so far and now he is yelling at me to destroy them and not even listen to my feelings/reasoning.”
In New York State, both spouses must sign off on surrogacy plans. Over the years, Bob had traveled so often that he let MaryBeth sign papers for him. “I got pretty good at his signature,” she says. He had eventually granted her power of attorney. Perhaps that covered a surrogacy contract too.
When MaryBeth got to thinking about it, Bob had done plenty of things without consulting her. Big stuff, too, like buying a new truck and paying off their timeshare in Orlando, Fla.
And what did he care, anyway? She was the one who raised their kids for 40 years while he flew around the world. She was the one who was going to raise these kids too.
On Feb. 13, 2023, MaryBeth stood at her dining-room table. On Page 23 of the gestational-surrogate agreement, above a signature line that read “Intended Father,” MaryBeth wrote in looping letters: ROBERT A. LEWIS. She later asked her brother-in-law to notarize the contract even though Bob wasn’t present.
A month later, MaryBeth met the surrogate in Syracuse. She paid for fertility acupuncture, and MaryBeth got herself a massage. “It was kind of like a nice spa day,” she says. A technician at the I.V.F. clinic thawed two embryos, and in an exam room, a doctor gently transferred them to the surrogate.
And then MaryBeth’s troubles began to grow.
MaryBeth didn’t know how to tell Bob, and before long, she began to have second thoughts about deceiving him. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to: CNY Fertility had not given the embryos a high-quality rating; she assumed she would be lucky to have even one embryo stick. Sure enough, the surrogate soon began bleeding, a sign of a possible impending miscarriage. “I thought, OK, well, if she loses the baby, she loses him,” she says. “But I tried and whatever.”
But the surrogate did not lose the baby. And three weeks after the implantation, MaryBeth traveled to an OB-GYN appointment and let out a scream of joy as the ultrasound showed not one child but two.
MaryBeth told no one. There were more papers to sign, more signatures to forge. Mixed with her anxiety was pure delight. Even though she had a basement full of hand-me-downs, MaryBeth ordered new baby clothes, car seats and a playpen. She wanted to feel the rush of new motherhood again. When Bob asked about the packages, she said they were for their daughter Liz, who was now pregnant herself.
All the while, MaryBeth kept trying to find a way to tell Bob. “There was many a time where I wanted to talk to him,” she says. “You have to hit him in a good mood in order to talk to him.” And Bob was as grumpy as ever.
There was an even more pressing issue. Four years earlier, when MaryBeth went behind Bob’s back to implant the embryos that resulted in their youngest daughter, no court needed deceiving. Like other states, New York considers the woman who gives birth to be the legal mother, and MaryBeth carried the child herself.
But now a surrogate was involved. And in 2021, New York passed the Child-Parent Security Act to legalize surrogacy and address the myriad issues that were likely to surface. MaryBeth and Bob would need to obtain a parentage order from a judge, which would officially transfer custody of the babies from the surrogate to them.
“And I’m thinking: I’m way over my head,” she says. “Now what do I do?”
On Sept. 22, 2023, with the surrogate due to deliver in just eight weeks, MaryBeth logged onto a court hearing via Zoom. She told the judge that her husband was away on a work trip in Japan. She logged on with a separate account for Bob and kept the camera turned off. When the judge addressed him, MaryBeth says she grunted in assent.
The court she was trying to fool wasn’t in a big city, where such hearings have become so common that they are veritable rubber-stamp proceedings. MaryBeth’s surrogate lived in Steuben County, a sparsely populated, rural area south of the Finger Lakes. The region was once a thriving industrial hub, but it had slowly become part of the Rust Belt. The courthouse handled a grim caseload of sexual abuse and fentanyl trafficking. Expensive surrogacy cases there were almost nonexistent, and MaryBeth’s parentage petition stuck out.
‘That’s when I got a little bonko.’
The man she had to get past was Judge Chauncey J. Watches. He was a 19-year veteran of the bench, with a reputation for probity that suited his Dickensian name. And he was suspicious of the sexagenarian would-be mother before him.
Before the hearing, Watches ordered the county’s Department of Social Services to conduct a home study, a highly unusual move in a surrogacy case. He also appointed the unborn twins their own legal counsel, a local lawyer and judge named David Coddington.
“I expect him to do his investigation so we can get a little more information about what is going on here,” Watches said at the hearing.
“Would you mind if I asked what’s unusual?” said Melissa Brisman, the lawyer for MaryBeth and, as far as she knew, for Bob.
“One thing, the ages of the parents: 66 and 67.”
MaryBeth cut in: “Well, the fertility clinic had no problem.”
“I’m not the fertility clinic,” Watches said. “I’m the judge.”
Regardless of age, Brisman explained, her clients had followed procedure. Coddington agreed. “I mean, we give kids to grandparents all the time,” he said, addressing the qualms about their ages. And the Lewises were well off.
The judge’s hands were tied. He signed the parentage order. MaryBeth and Bob would soon be the legal parents of a baby boy and a baby girl.
Six days later, MaryBeth was at work, examining a patient, when her phone rang. It was Bob.
For eight months, MaryBeth had made sure all legal correspondence was sent to a P.O. box. But the judge’s order was sent to their house. And Bob had picked up the mail.
“What did you do?” he screamed.
“Let me explain,” she said. She begged him again and again: “Let me explain. Let me explain.” Bob kept shouting.
Their four oldest daughters’ phones soon pinged. Marissa was in bed with her young son. Liz was five months pregnant. Bob had sent the group chat a photo of the parentage order and a message: “Look what your mother did.”
At home, Bob again read the paperwork, found the name of “his” lawyer and called Brisman’s New Jersey office. She in turn alerted Judge Watches. Then Bob called MaryBeth again.
“I just reported you,” MaryBeth remembers him saying. Then he laughed. “You’re going to get arrested.”
The Lewis family erupted in recriminations. MaryBeth’s teenage daughters were the presumed front-line child care for the twins once they were born. “All of us were pissed,” Isabelle says, “because we knew we couldn’t handle another child, let alone two.”
Liz spent years repairing her relationship with MaryBeth after the Easter pregnancy announcement in 2019. “And then this happened,” Liz says, “and it just completely shattered it again.” She was a single mother-to-be, with assurances from MaryBeth that she would help out. “I thought you were going to be this grandmother you said you wanted to be.”
While the Lewis children raged at MaryBeth, nearly 100 miles away in Steuben County, the court rescinded MaryBeth and Bob’s parentage order. The Department of Social Services soon argued that the twins should be considered wards of the state.
Social Services laid out its case: The sperm and egg donors had waived their rights to any offspring. The surrogate, just weeks away from giving birth, did not want the children. Without a parentage order, MaryBeth was not their mother. In fact, they had no mother at all.
Scott Fierro, then a lawyer for the agency, concluded in a destitute-child petition: “Baby A and Baby B have (or will have) no parents under New York law.”
An investigator from the Department of Social Services soon visited Elma to conduct the home study that Judge Watches ordered. Eager to reassure the agency that she was a fit mother, MaryBeth painted a picture of relative domestic bliss. But Bob was still feeling raw, and he was blunt.
“She wanted more children,” Bob said. “I didn’t.” He doubted that MaryBeth could care for the twins. Their marriage had been in crisis for a decade and was “over.” When MaryBeth learned about this last remark, she flatly told Bob, in front of the investigator, “I get half of everything then.” They did not make a sterling impression.
But Bob soon realized the enormity of his decision to report MaryBeth: ruinous legal fees, the potential breakup of his family. His life had one organizing principle. “For over 40 years, she’s pretty much gotten her way with anything she’s wanted from me,” he says. This would be no different.
Incredibly, Bob now informed an agency investigator that he’d had a change of heart. “Just so you know MaryBeth and I have talked things over, and we have agreed in order to keep our family together I will request the children go to both of us,” he told the investigator. The couple even executed a new contract with the surrogate, which Bob himself signed this time, stating that they intended to be the parents.
‘She wanted more children. I didn’t.’
The unborn children were still in legal limbo. But with Bob on board, MaryBeth was cautiously optimistic. She wanted to breastfeed the twins. She joined a lactation group on Facebook, through which she bought domperidone, a nausea medication not approved in the United States that has an off-label use for stimulating breast-milk production. When her supply came in, she pumped and froze the milk.
The surrogate was due on Nov. 26, but doctors induced her early. MaryBeth was desperate to be present for the delivery. When she got home from Walmart, Bob was adamant. He would watch the kids. “Go,” he said. “Go see our babies.”
As MaryBeth sped down the highway, she and the surrogate traded texts. Then her phone buzzed with photos: nurses weighing and measuring faceless nuggets wrapped in pink and blue blankets. MaryBeth began to cry — she had missed their births, and now the stress and uncertainty of the situation hit her all over again.
By the time MaryBeth arrived, news of the alleged fraud had beaten her to the hospital. After she left the maternity ward, she checked into a motel. The next day, MaryBeth sat in her room and dialed into an emergency court hearing. Her lawyer, Timothy J. Hennessy, made his case. Bob had agreed to raise the twins. The Lewis family had financial means. “I don’t know why the county is so hell-bent on bastardizing these children,” Hennessy said.
Scott Fierro, the Social Services lawyer, was having none of it. “We can’t just have crimes committed with relation to the creation of life,” he said, “and then have them get exactly what they wanted under that criminal conduct.” The twins were going home with two wonderful foster parents, he noted. “The place where the children are now does not have the criminal and civil liability baggage that applies to Ms. Lewis.”
Judge Watches agreed. The twins would stay in foster care. He signed a temporary order of protection, barring MaryBeth and Bob from contacting the children. The next day, MaryBeth drove home with two empty car seats.
The East Aurora Advertiser once published a charming portrait of the growing Lewis family. But on Dec. 7, 2023, it ran a new headline: “Elma Resident Indicted for Attempted Kidnapping.”
Brooks T. Baker, the district attorney, was stunned when he learned of the fraud. It was so bold, so meticulous. “We looked at it first and said, ‘Is this for real?’” he says. “It is such an off-the-wall collection of allegations.” But that shock soon hardened into the moral outrage shared by Judge Watches and Social Services. MaryBeth Lewis had done a terrible thing to the court, to her husband and particularly to two innocent children. She needed to be punished. Baker charged MaryBeth with 30 criminal counts, including forgery, falsifying business records and perjury. The attempted-kidnapping count was “a creative legal charge,” Baker says — and a reflection of just how disturbed he was by her actions.
Now, MaryBeth says, “all crap broke loose.” The principal of her children’s school barred her from campus. The Girl Scouts booted her too. Buffalo State University, where she was employed at a medical clinic, asked her to work from home and later put her on unpaid leave. At home, the youngest Lewis kids cried often — they worried that she would go to prison.
Baker soon offered a deal: Plead guilty to two felonies (and most likely lose her nursing license), serve no more than six months in jail and forfeit her rights to the twins.
MaryBeth wanted to fight for her freedom — and for the twins. Her attorney in the custody case had already encouraged her to let the Department of Social Services keep the twins and try again the “right way” with new embryos. And now, after the indictment, her criminal lawyer advised her to accept the offer. “I’m not taking it,” she said flatly. “These are my children.”
Baker offered a new deal. MaryBeth rejected it again. As the months passed, even after she stopped pumping and freezing breast milk, she performed small acts of hope. She swapped the newborn diapers for size 1s, and then those for size 2s.
Most of the older Lewis kids rallied around MaryBeth. They couldn’t believe that the government would keep the twins from their parents. When Social Services investigators conducted their home study, they repeatedly asked Marissa about the younger Lewis kids: “How do you know these are your siblings?” It made no sense to her. “The kids either look exactly like my mom’s side of the family or my dad’s side, all of them,” Marissa says. MaryBeth’s children still didn’t know what was now in public court documents and on local news blogs: that she had used donor embryos and that her children were not all genetically related.
In June 2024, MaryBeth rejected a third plea deal. To pay her mounting legal bills, she raided her 401(k) account, maxed out three credit cards and took a stressful new nursing job. The couple’s tax hit for making the retirement withdrawals was staggering. Amid it all, her criminal lawyer quit, and Judge Watches declined to admit the new out-of-state counsel she hired. She had no legal strategy and dimming hopes.
All the while, MaryBeth wondered what the twins were like. The surrogate had told her that the boy had blond hair, the girl had brown. She was the smaller of the two. “Their cries were awesome,” she says. “That’s all I know.” Every night before bed, she prayed with her younger children and asked God to bring the babies home.
What makes a woman a mother? MaryBeth’s case became a legal quagmire in part because everyone involved had a different answer — and visceral reaction — to that deceptively simple human question.
There is genetic motherhood: the woman who provides the egg from which an embryo is created. There is gestational motherhood: New research shows that the woman who carries the fetus, even if not genetically related, can influence eventual gene expression. And there is social motherhood: the woman who raises the child.
Most mothers are all three. In cases of adoption or surrogacy, those roles can be divided between two or even three women. But MaryBeth was none of them. She shared neither DNA, nor her womb, nor her home, with Baby A and Baby B. To the local attorneys arrayed against her, MaryBeth wasn’t their mother. She was closer to a human trafficker.
But MaryBeth’s legal position was stronger than it appeared. I.V.F. custody disputes are almost as old as I.V.F. itself. An early clash was the 1993 case Johnson v. Calvert, in which a surrogate threatened to withhold the baby after giving birth. A California court issued a landmark ruling in favor of the child’s genetic parents, writing: “But for their acted-on intention, the child would not exist.” Ever since, courts have recognized the concept of intent as a tiebreaker in disputes between intended parents and surrogates.
While MaryBeth was not the twins’ genetic mother, a paragraph buried in the state’s Family Court Act drew on that idea of intent to resolve troubled surrogacy agreements like hers, stating: “The court shall determine parentage based on the intent of the parties, taking into account the best interests of the child.” Bob had vouched that he wanted the twins. And even after all the deception, MaryBeth’s surrogate still wanted the twins to go to the Lewis home.
MaryBeth had one more ace up her sleeve. When children were removed from their homes, the Family Court Act directed social services to place them with any existing genetic siblings. And MaryBeth and Bob’s three youngest kids hailed from the same batch of embryos.
In mid-2024, MaryBeth got a referral to a law office in Rochester, N.Y. Rhian D. Jones and Sarah E. Wesley, two of the lawyers there, smelled a great case. “I honestly couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Wesley says. “It was one of those jaw-on-the-desk things.” The firm mostly handled violent felonies. But this was a novel case — a chance to create legal precedent. Wesley and Jones signed on to represent MaryBeth in both her criminal and family court cases, even capping their fees at $100,000 to give her a break.
Last November, the two lawyers drove down to Steuben County for their first hearing in the custody case, parked Wesley’s white Mercedes S.U.V. in the courthouse lot and slipped into the back of the courtroom. They sat there unnoticed, listening to local attorneys gossip about MaryBeth.
“She paid a lot of money to get these lawyers out of Rochester,” one of them said, mocking what seemed a futile attempt to resuscitate her legal defense and custody fight.
Wesley raised her hand. “Yeah, that’s us,” she called out. The courtroom went quiet. “We’re here.”
Wesley had initially maintained a healthy skepticism of MaryBeth’s conspiratorial depiction of Judge Watches. But now MaryBeth’s lawyers saw it too: a chummy, small-town courthouse that had become obsessed with keeping her from the babies. In the judge’s chambers, Wesley referred to MaryBeth’s faith as a motivation for her alleged fraud. Watches replied, speaking of her decision to use I.V.F., “If she was really Catholic, she wouldn’t have done this at all.”
The fixation on MaryBeth’s alleged crimes as a pretext for keeping the twins in foster care struck Wesley as absurd: All across the region, she had seen children returned to drug addicts and serial abusers. Even Brooks Baker, the prosecutor, admitted that it was an unusual situation. “In most of these cases,” he says, “it’s not a nurse and a pilot.”
And then, as they pored over a year’s worth of court records, Wesley and Jones found what they believed was an obvious violation of due process: The parentage order had been revoked based on nothing more than a tip from MaryBeth’s lawyer, Melissa Brisman. She also most likely violated attorney-client privilege by contacting Judge Watches, Wesley says. (When asked to comment, Brisman responded by email: “At all times, my actions were consistent with my professional and ethical obligations to my former client and to the court as a fraud was committed upon my office.”)
Wesley now had a toehold. “You can’t just make a court order based on a phone call,” Wesley says. “He was just making up his own rules.” If the court had recognized the re-executed parentage order — the one signed by both MaryBeth and Bob — the twins would have gone home from the hospital with the Lewises, she points out. The whole mess could have been avoided.
Wesley felt a sense of urgency — every day the twins stayed in foster care would make relocation harder on them. On her Facebook Marketplace page, the foster mother listed used baby items: a bouncer that attached to a door jamb, an activity station. Little reminders of the formative time that MaryBeth had already missed.
Rather than file a time-consuming recusal motion or a judicial complaint, Wesley opted for a shortcut. A family friend, Thomas E. Moran, was an influential State Supreme Court judge based in Rochester. They met up, and she shocked him with the procedural errors in the case. Moran had a conversation with Watches. In April, Watches recused himself. (Watches declined to comment. A spokesman for Moran’s office told The Times that the judge is not permitted to comment on pending litigation.)
The scales now tilted back in MaryBeth’s favor. In May, Judge Matthew McCarthy began unwinding the court’s missteps. Down in Steuben County, the foster parents hired a lawyer and formally filed for adoption. They were eager to tell their side of the story, but confidentiality laws forbade it. “We sincerely hope your reporting will champion justice, uphold integrity and advocate for the protection of two very precious children,” the foster father wrote.
And then, on Oct. 20, Judge McCarthy dropped the bomb: He officially recognized MaryBeth and Bob as the legal parents. Two weeks shy of their second birthdays, the twins obtained new names in court filings: Baby A Lewis and Baby B Lewis. The judge ordered the children to be transferred to MaryBeth and Bob’s custody.
In her text messages to me, MaryBeth was ecstatic: “I’m hoping now to get the babies ASAP!!!!!!!”
On the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 28, a heavy fog descended on Steuben County. MaryBeth and Bob wound their way through the mist to the courthouse. After two years of legal uncertainty, they hoped that somewhere on the other side of that darkness two children were waiting.
In the week since McCarthy’s parentage ruling, the opposing counsel had been busy. The twins’ court-appointed attorney had secured a last-minute, temporary stay from an appellate court. In Courtroom 6, Sarah Wesley was outraged. All the twins’ lawyer had done, she said, was delay the inevitable, eat up more time — and make the eventual handoff that much more devastating for the them. The attorneys traded barbs. “Stop the nonsense,” Bob’s lawyer, Jon Stern, said. “Start the reunification.”
It was the appropriate legal term, but it was also a misnomer. MaryBeth and Bob had never met the twins. Baby A and Baby B had only ever known one home. While lawyers argued over who their parents were, the twins already called two people Mommy and Daddy.
The foster parents sat next to their attorney in the courtroom. They were in their late 30s, well dressed and affable. The man was tall and broad-shouldered. The woman had blond curls and wore a long, billowy skirt.
In the hallway before the hearing, she had tried to project a sunny confidence. At night, she told me, the kids loved reading Eric Carle books, especially “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” “They’re at the point where they can read it to me,” she said. “So I get a bedtime story.” The twins’ second birthday was on Sunday. The foster parents had a party planned — that is, if they still had custody by the weekend. The woman’s smile fell away. She sat down on a bench and clasped her hands as if in prayer.
Judge McCarthy gave every indication that MaryBeth and Bob were headed for victory. He ordered the Department of Social Services to open its case files to the Lewises. They would finally learn the twins’ names, which MaryBeth plans to change. He then scheduled the next hearing for late November. Bob raised his arms in frustration. MaryBeth shook her head. They would be waiting to meet the children for at least another month. The twins would have their birthday party in Steuben County after all.
“It’s just terrible,” MaryBeth said in the parking lot, “what they have done to myself, Bob and our kids.” The Lewises were eager to get on the road. They had a lot to do back in Elma: dropping girls off at gymnastics classes, returning a Halloween costume to the store, making spaghetti dinner. And at some point, Bob had two cribs to assemble.
MaryBeth still had pending criminal charges, but her lawyers were confident they would strike a deal that avoided jail time. In quiet moments, she entertains the possibility that she made some mistakes. But a crystal clarity always returns. She plucked the twins from a frozen, celestial limbo and put them on this earth. She gave them life. How could she ever regret this? “I saved these embryos from being destroyed,” she says. “I saved my children.”
Additional reporting by Isabel Hodges-Lewis.
The post The Woman Who Wouldn’t Stop Having Children appeared first on New York Times.
