WSJ (“The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of U.S.-Born Babies Via Surrogate“):
Clerks working for family court Judge Amy Pellman were reviewing routine surrogacy petitions when they spotted an unusual pattern: the same name, again and again.
A Chinese billionaire was seeking parental rights to at least four unborn children, and the court’s additional research showed that he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more—all through surrogates.
When Pellman called Xu Bo in for a confidential hearing in the summer of 2023, he never entered the courtroom, according to people who attended the hearing. The maker of fantasy videogames lived in China and appeared via video, speaking through an interpreter. He said he hoped to have 20 or so U.S.-born children through surrogacy—boys, because they’re superior to girls—to one day take over his business.
One wonders what happens when the fetus is determined to be female. Does he demand the mother abort it? Abandon the child?
The judge denied his request for parentage—normally quickly approved for the intended parents of a baby born through surrogacy, experts say. The decision left the children he’d paid for to be born in legal limbo.
One would hope. Alas, Xu isn’t an isolated case.
Pellman’s decision in the confidential case, which has never been reported, was a rare rebuke to a little-known trend in the largely unregulated U.S. surrogacy industry: Chinese elites and billionaires who are going outside of China, where domestic surrogacy is illegal, to quietly have large numbers of U.S.-born babies.
[…]
Some Chinese parents, inspired by Elon Musk’s 14 known children, pay millions in surrogacy fees to hire women in the U.S. to help them build families of jaw-dropping size. Xu calls himself “China’s first father” and is known in China as a vocal critic of feminism. On social media, his company said he has more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the U.S.
Another wealthy Chinese executive, Wang Huiwu, hired U.S. models and others as egg donors to have 10 girls, with the aim of one day marrying them off to powerful men, according to people close to the executive’s education company.
Other Chinese clients, usually seeking more typical numbers of babies, are high-powered executives lacking the time and inclination to bear their own children, older parents or same-sex couples, according to people who arrange surrogacy deals and work in surrogacy law. All have the wealth to go outside China while maintaining the privacy needed to manage potential logistical, publicity and legal issues back home. Some have the political clout to avoid censure.
The market has grown so sophisticated, experts say, that at times Chinese parents have had U.S.-born children without stepping foot in the country. A thriving mini-industry of American surrogacy agencies, law firms, clinics, delivery agencies and nanny services—even to pick up the newborns from hospitals—has risen to accommodate the demand, permitting parents to ship their genetic material abroad and get a baby delivered back, at a cost of up to $200,000 per child.
The growing Asian market for international fertility services has drawn the attention of American investors, including Peter Thiel, whose family office has backed a chain of IVF clinics across Southeast Asia and a recently opened branch in Los Angeles.
This is, to say the least, all rather sleazy. It amounts to human trafficking.
In 2020, the State Department moved to curb so-called birth tourism, tightening visa rules for women suspected of visiting the U.S. to give birth. In January, Donald Trump issued an executive order denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. unless one of their parents was a citizen or permanent legal resident, which is being reviewed by the Supreme Court. It’s unclear if either regulation would apply to foreigners working with surrogates who are Americans.
While the order is almost certainly unconstitutional, it does seem perfectly reasonable to deny citizenship in cases where the sole purpose was to create an American citizen baby.
Last month, Sen. Rick Scott, the Florida Republican, introduced a bill in the Senate to ban the use of surrogacy in the U.S. by people from some foreign countries, including China. He cited an ongoing federal human trafficking investigation into a Chinese-American couple in Los Angeles who have more than two dozen children, nearly all born through surrogacy within the past four years, as reported by the Journal.
It’s honestly just such a bizarre notion. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of women renting out their womb to begin with, in that it’s so wildly exploitative. Doing it to stroke the egos of foreign plutocrats even more so.
Nathan Zhang, the founder and CEO of IVF USA, a network of fertility clinics in the U.S. and Mexico that cater to wealthy Chinese and partner with surrogacy agencies, said his clientele in the past were largely parents trying to bypass China’s one-child policy. Babies brought back to China, as U.S. citizens instead of Chinese citizens, fell outside the country’s penalty system. The one-child policy was abolished in 2015.
More recently, a new clientele has emerged. “Elon Musk is becoming a role model now,” said Zhang. An increasing number of “crazy rich” clients are commissioning dozens, or even hundreds, of U.S.-born babies with the goal of “forging an unstoppable family dynasty,” he said.
One wealthy businessman in China, who like Wang is also in the education business, wanted more than 200 children at once using surrogates, envisioning a family enterprise, Zhang said. “I asked him directly, ‘How do you plan to raise all these children?’ He was speechless,” said Zhang, who said he refused him as a client.
Other surrogacy professionals described similarly head-spinning numbers. The owner of one agency in California said he had helped fill an order for a Chinese parent seeking 100 children in the past few years, a request spread over several agencies.
A Los Angeles surrogacy attorney said he had helped his client, a Chinese billionaire, have 20 children through surrogacy in recent years.
This is farming, not parenting.
It’s not clear from the report why these men are targeting the United States. Granting that we have a lot of poor women desperate for money, one would imagine it would be considerably cheaper to exploit women in the developing world. Are our surrogacy laws friendlier? Is the American citizenship of the children being exploited in some way?
It appears that there’s very little regulation, with only the conscience of the service providers themselves constraining those seeking large numbers of surrogate births. And, even then, there are workarounds.
Oversight of the industry is so scant that it’s almost impossible to figure out whether parents are working with multiple surrogates, across different agencies and law firms, people in the industry said.
[…]
Industry groups recommend that agencies and IVF clinics not work with parents seeking more than two simultaneous surrogacies, because of the logistical and emotional challenges, and the risk that it will increase the perception that surrogacy commodifies pregnancy. But Millan said the suggestion lacks teeth. The harshest penalty for failing to follow the groups’ recommendations is to be removed as a member.
Lisa Stark Hughes, a surrogacy agency owner and board member of the Society for Ethics for Egg Donation and Surrogacy, acknowledged the difficulty of ensuring those recommendations are followed. The group has been discussing ways to more proactively detect when parents are pursuing multiple simultaneous surrogacies across different agencies without violating patient privacy laws, she said.
Some agencies don’t hesitate. Hu Yihan, the CEO of New York IVF clinic Global Fertility & Genetics, who helps connect Chinese parents with surrogacy agencies, said that when one of her clients wants three or four simultaneous surrogacies, the reaction is often enthusiastic. “I’m getting positive feedback from the surrogacy agencies, they’re like, ‘This is a big one! I want to do this!’” she said.
Agencies typically receive $40,000 to $50,000 per surrogacy, separately from payments made to the surrogate carriers.
Truly sickening.
