Virginia Hart, Founder of ART Risk, and Sarah Paige, CEO of ART Risk and President of the Insurance Access & Equity Alliance

It started with a phone call.

A client came to Virginia Hart with a question that should have had an easy answer: could she help find insurance coverage for a surrogate? Virginia had spent years as a licensed agent. She knew the policies inside out. And she didn't have an answer, because nobody did. The coverage simply wasn't built for the families who needed it most.

That single question became her life's work.

In 2010, Virginia founded ART Risk Financial & Insurance Solutions. It was a one-woman operation built on a belief that hasn't changed since, the people behind a surrogacy journey deserve to feel protected, not exposed. She wasn't waiting for the insurance industry to catch up to surrogacy. She started doing the work of closing the gap herself. One policy and one family at a time.

"The greatest joy of my career has been helping others fulfill their dream of building a family," Virginia has said. Twenty-five years as a licensed agent, and that's still the line she comes back to.

The hard part nobody talks about

Surrogacy is full of moments worth celebrating. It's also full of paperwork and risks that can cause it to quietly fall apart.

A standard health plan wasn't designed to cover a gestational carrier's pregnancy. Claims can land on the wrong policy. Coverage can be denied for reasons that have nothing to do with the baby and everything to do with how the word "surrogacy" is treated in fine print. For a family who has already spent years and savings to get this far, an insurance surprise isn't an inconvenience. Rather, it's the kind of thing that can stop a journey cold.

Virginia built ART Risk to catch those problems before they reach the family. Reading the policy line by line. Calling the carrier directly and getting it in writing. Telling intended parents the truth about what their coverage will and won't do, early enough for it to matter.

The next generation steps in

The same year Virginia founded the company, her daughter Sarah Paige entered the field beside her.

Sarah learned the work the way you learn a family trade, from someone who cared about getting it right. But she also brought her own question to it: why should access to coverage depend on which state you live in, or how your family happens to be shaped?

That question took her somewhere her mother's never had. In 2019, Sarah sat as an expert witness on Nevada Assembly Bill AB472, working alongside its author, attorney Kimberly Surratt. The result was inclusive insurance language for surrogacy written into Nevada law. Not a policy she sold or a claim she fixed, but a rule she helped change for families she'll never meet.

She didn't stop there. Sarah is a founder and the sitting Board President of the Insurance Access and Equity Alliance, an officer with SEEDS, and a regular voice for legislators, attorneys, and advocates trying to pull discrimination out of the system at the root. Today she leads ART Risk as CEO.

What two decades adds up to

Now the numbers mean something, because you know the people behind them.

What began with one client's unanswered question has grown into a company licensed in all 50 states, with a team that has helped protect more than 15,000 families on their way to parenthood. Virginia serves as Executive Chair. Sarah runs the company. The handoff between them is the rare kind that doesn't lose anything in the translation.

It's a family business, in the most literal sense. A mother and daughter who built their life's work around other people's families.

Why this is part of our story

Behind every surrogacy journey are systems most people never see: the insurance, the legal protections, the financial planning that have to hold steady so a family can move forward with confidence. When that infrastructure works, it's invisible. When it fails, it can take the whole journey down with it.

Virginia and Sarah have spent two decades making sure it holds. That's the same village The Surrogacy Foundation is building so that no family has to navigate it alone.

This isn't an abstract partnership for The Surrogacy Foundation. Sarah and TSF Executive Director Zach French have emceed two SEEDS conferences together. ART Risk is a Founding Partners, and sponsored the March Surrogacy Awareness campaign. The most successful ever run by The Surrogacy Foundation and the reason so many of the stories on this site exist at all. Virginia and her husband haven't missed a single Surrogacy Soirée since the day they found out about The Surrogacy Foundation. Most importantly when the phone rings we always pick it up.