“International commercial surrogacy.” It’s not just a blip on the margins of modernity. It’s grown into a full-fledged industry.
It has even provoked the issue of draft U.S. legislation, the Stopping Adversarial Foreign Exploitation of Kids in Domestic Surrogacy (SAFE KIDS) Act.
The United States is a world leader in this unusual business. “While most developed nations prohibit international commercial surrogacy, the United States, along with Ukraine, supports a thriving reproductive tourism industry.”
Red China’s elite loom large in the customer base.
Beijing once imposed a ban on family size and still has one on surrogate births. When the birth ban was in force, Chinese with money could dodge it via surrogacy in the U.S. Demand grew quickly.
In 2014, Amy Kaplan directed an outfit called West Coast Surrogacy. “She says Chinese surrogacy took off in recent years through word of mouth. Her agency saw its first Chinese client in 2009. Now [in 2014], an estimated 47 percent of clients waiting for a surrogate are from mainland China.”
Things have gotten a lot crazier since 2014. No wonder. This business “allows foreign nationals to have children through American surrogate mothers and return home with a baby and U.S. citizenship in hand. Once the child turns twenty-one, the entire family can apply for citizenship through a green card application—a method, one surrogacy agency notes, that is a ‘cheaper alternative to the American EB-5 visa.’ ”
Note that the agency’s selling point is citizenship, not biological or legal limits.
Abnormal restraint
Nathan Zhang is CEO of the surrogacy service IVF USA. He says that although earlier clients were motivated by a desire evade China’s one-child policy, “new wealthier parents now aim to commission dozens, or even hundreds, of US-born children with the goal of ‘forging an unstoppable family dynasty.’ Zhang added that Elon Musk is seen as a ‘role model now,’ referencing the Tesla CEO’s 14 known children.”
One Chinese billionaire, especially, is gaining notoriety for his surrogate children.
At a Los Angeles family court, clerks noticed a striking pattern while reviewing routine surrogacy petitions. The same name repeatedly appeared. Xu Bo, a Chinese videogame executive, was seeking parental rights for at least four unborn children, while court records indicated he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more, all through surrogates.
Xu’s ex-girlfriend, Tang Jing, has alleged on Weibo that he has 300 children living across multiple countries.
Zhang relates that “he had refused one businessman who wanted more than 200 children at once via surrogates. When asked how he planned to raise them, the client was ‘speechless.’ ”
Zhang’s restraint seems abnormal. “The owner of an agency in California said he had helped fill an order [!] for a Chinese parent seeking 100 children in the last few years. [Emphasis added…] A surrogacy lawyer based in Los Angeles said he helped his Chinese billionaire client have 20 children in recent years.”
This is horrifying—not only for the children. Also for the mothers, who may not be volunteers. Women from Asia are “trafficked into illegal and abusive surrogacy arrangements that often involved forced egg retrieval and exploitation so severe that some victims said it was worse than prostitution, because ‘they really had no idea what had been done to their bodies. Sex work was self-explanatory, but white pills, injections and suppositories could be anything.’ ”
The “buyers” of surrogacy services may also fussily try to dictate the mother’s lifestyle during pregnancy: diet, activity, mandatory rest.
The SAFE KIDS Act
Florida Senator Rick Scott introduced the SAFE KIDS Act in November. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee, where it currently reposes.
In a press release announcing the bill, Scott says he is concerned about three things: “adversaries” using surrogates to gain citizenship for their kids and themselves; trafficking of infants abroad; and “establishing accountability for third parties who facilitate commercial surrogacy.”
“This legislation follows terrifying reporting on the abuse of newborns, as well as US surrogate mothers who were deceived into giving birth to children for foreign nationals,” he says.
As Scott has noticed, the use of surrogate births by calculating, ruthless billionaires opens the question of trafficking infants. There is the cost of the surrogacy services. Then there is the price paid for a healthy infant on the black market, plus the premium paid for the child’s U.S. citizenship and documentation. Good business? Sky’s the limit?
Scott says that his law would invalidate “any commercial surrogacy agreement that is entered into with a citizen of a foreign adversarial nation” and create a “misdemeanor for brokers—not surrogates—who knowingly or recklessly facilitate a prohibited commercial surrogacy agreement with citizens from a foreign adversarial nation.”
His bill seems focused on the national security angle of surrogacy. But maybe we don’t need a law, just a reporting system that advises the communist government that one of its slaves is circumventing Beijing’s laws.
We do, however, clearly need laws or contracts to represent the interests of the child. □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
