When a California family court handling surrogacy petitions realized a Chinese billionaire was seeking parental rights to at least four unborn children, and learned he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more through surrogates, it raised alarm.
Judge Amy Pellman denied Xu Bo’s request for parentage, 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.
Here are five takeaways from The Wall Street Journal’s investigation into the practice.
Elon Musk, who has 14 known children, has inspired some superwealthy Chinese.
Xu, the maker of fantasy videogames, calls himself “China’s first father” and is known 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. The owner of one surrogacy 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.
Babies born via surrogacy in the U.S. are U.S. citizens by virtue of the 14th Amendment.
The idea of foreign nationals using the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship has long been a political flashpoint. 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. 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.
Some 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 international 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. 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, are betting the demand will continue to grow. “The U.S. remains the destination for people who have the resources and need to go down that path,” said Margaret Wang, the CEO of the Thiel-backed venture, Rhea Fertility.
Most U.S. states don’t bar international parents from working with American surrogates.
But law enforcement is broadly looking at some Chinese parents working with American surrogates. Investigators with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have interviewed some surrogates who have worked with Chinese parents, according to the surrogates, though the purpose of those investigations is unclear. There is 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. 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, and since U.S. court proceedings for surrogacies are usually private, public awareness is limited.
Surrogacy within China is illegal.
Chinese law doesn’t strictly prohibit its citizens from going overseas for surrogacy, but officials have criticized it. Stories of Chinese celebrities or government officials working with overseas surrogates have sometimes caused scandal among the public at home, which tends to view surrogacy as ethically dubious and exploitative. Wang Huiwu, the education executive, was criticized by Chinese media, which said commercial surrogacy exploits women and violates Chinese public order and morals. Shares at his company plunged around that time. Actress Zheng Shuang and her boyfriend, Zhang Heng, were criticized by the Chinese Communist Party after their U.S. surrogacies became public. The actress was dropped by fashion labels and the couple were investigated for tax evasion.
Write to Katherine Long at katherine.long@wsj.com, Ben Foldy at ben.foldy@wsj.com and Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com