Two strangers arrived at Kyla Simpson’s Florida home in March 2025 to collect the three baby boys she had carried in her womb, brought into the world, and nurtured for four and a half months. They claimed they had been sent by the children’s intended father — a Chinese citizen who had commissioned the surrogacy but had never traveled to the United States.
Kyla refused to answer the door and contacted authorities. The babies had spent several months in her care while the intended father repeatedly delayed retrieving them. Months after the strange visit, tragedy struck when one of the triplets died unexpectedly.
Kyla and her family grieved while cooperating with standard law enforcement and child welfare investigations. They were cleared. When he died, it was Kyla — not the intended father — who arranged his funeral and buried him. The intended father, she says, remained absent.
Kyla grieved and buried the child she had been told was never really hers. Kyla continued raising the two surviving boys at her home in Florida until they were unexpectedly taken away from the only home and family they knew in June of this year. Kyla said she is unsure who exactly is taking care of the boys or where they are located during court proceedings, and she has stated that the intended father is trying to relocate the boys to California and ultimately on to China.
Now the case has drawn the attention of the Florida Attorney General’s Office. On July 20, a Florida court granted Attorney General James Uthmeier’s emergency motion to intervene and temporarily barred the children from being removed from Florida or the United States while significant legal questions remain unresolved. The court concluded that Florida has an important interest in ensuring that custody determinations involving children born and raised in the state are made according to Florida law and in the children’s best interests.
The court recognized the urgency of preserving its jurisdiction: If the children were removed to China — a country that is not a party to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction — they could be placed beyond the practical reach of Florida courts before those legal questions could even be resolved.
No one imagines a surrogacy ending this way, but they should.
For years, the fertility industry has marketed commercial surrogacy as a carefully managed process in which contracts eliminate uncertainty: Intended parents receive a child, surrogate mothers receive compensation, and children enter loving homes. Kyla’s story exposes a different reality — an international marketplace that leaves women and children vulnerable when intended parents, agencies, or contracts fail. They become custody disputes, international jurisdictional battles, and child welfare concerns that governments are forced to address after a child has already been born.
Kyla entered surrogacy hoping to help someone become a parent while providing financial stability for her family. She agreed to carry two embryos for a single intended father living in China. She says she was never adequately informed about the risks of transferring multiple embryos — a decision that ultimately resulted in a high-risk triplet pregnancy after one embryo split.
Kyla has shared with the Center for Bioethics and Culture how safeguards she had been promised began to unravel throughout her pregnancy. (The author began working with Kyla after learning of her situation and has helped bring attention to the legal and ethical concerns raised by her case, while also assisting with fundraising for attorneys’ fees.) Her case manager left, escrow payments became delayed, and she found herself fighting simply to receive promised compensation under contract while carrying three medically fragile babies in a high-risk pregnancy.
Shortly before delivery, the intended father asked Kyla to care for the babies after they left the NICU until he could travel to America to retrieve them. Legal documents granted her physical custody and decision-making authority until the intended father’s arrival.
He never came.
Kyla became, in every meaningful sense of the word, their mother. She visited them in the NICU, pumped breast milk around the clock, attended appointments, and brought them home. She and her husband cared for the boys alongside their young daughter, who called them her brothers.
The fertility industry often assures surrogate mothers that emotional attachment can be managed — that carrying someone else’s child is simply a service.
Kyla’s reality proved otherwise:
They teach you you’re not supposed to bond with them in the womb. I tried to do everything in my ability to not, but it’s like once your reality sets in, these children need somebody.
Pregnancy is not simply a biological process. The bond between mother and child cannot simply be erased because lawyers drafted paperwork saying it should not exist. Commercial surrogacy depends upon pretending otherwise.
Kyla’s story is not an aberration. It is a warning about an industry that increasingly operates across international borders with little public scrutiny. Fertility clinics, agencies, attorneys, escrow companies, egg providers, surrogate mothers, and intended parents often live in different states — or different countries — creating children whose legal and physical lives span multiple jurisdictions.
This internationalization is not a niche phenomenon. A 2024 Fertility and Sterility study of more than 40,000 U.S. gestational carrier embryo transfers found that roughly one-third involved international intended parents, increasing to nearly 40 percent by 2019. International intended parents were disproportionately male, and China was the largest country of origin. International surrogacy is no longer an exception — it has become a substantial part of the American fertility industry.
Kyla’s case highlights risks in the expanding international market. When arrangements collapse, disputes go beyond contracts and become issues of jurisdiction, competing legal systems, and, ultimately, protecting the children caught in the middle. The Supreme Court’s recent decision on birthplace citizenship emphasizes the United States as an attractive destination for international surrogacy involving foreign intended parents because of its relatively permissive surrogacy laws in several states and the legal advantages associated with a child born on U.S. soil. Children deserve better than to become the subject of international commercial transactions.
This is why policymakers can no longer treat commercial surrogacy as merely another fertility service or private contract between consenting adults. At a minimum, Congress and the states should prohibit international commercial surrogacy arrangements, require background checks and home studies for all intended parents, mandate comprehensive reporting of maternal and child outcomes, strengthen oversight of agencies, eliminate all financial incentives that drive commercial surrogacy, and ensure that children’s welfare — not contractual expectations or financial interests — governs every legal decision.
For too long, debates over surrogacy have revolved around adults: adults who long for children, adults seeking income, adults exercising reproductive autonomy, and adults signing contracts. It’s time we revolve the conversation around children.
The commercial surrogacy industry asks us to believe that contracts can redefine motherhood, assign parenthood, and eliminate the bonds formed during pregnancy and infancy. Kyla’s experience demonstrates the opposite. Contracts may determine legal rights, but they cannot manufacture love, responsibility, or parental devotion. Children know the people who feed them, hold them, comfort them, and respond when they cry.
For these boys, that person has been Kyla. Today, they are gone from the only home they have ever known. One can only wonder how they understand what has happened, who comforts them when they are frightened, and whether anyone has explained why the woman they knew as “Mom” is suddenly no longer there.
Kyla is continuing to fight for the custody and protection of the children she has raised since birth. Those who wish to support her ongoing legal expenses can contribute here.
