The rent-a-womb business is booming, and politicians and the media are finally noticing the wild, wild West of third-party reproduction. That attention alone, however, doesn’t rectify the moral, ethical, and even national security costs that come with a largely unregulated surrogacy industry. If you want proof that the problems with third-party reproduction persist, take one look at the surrogacy news cycle over the last two weeks.
On September 9, an Alaskan surrogate who moved to Texas to protect the baby she was carrying from the abortion his parents demanded due to a treatable heart condition asked the Supreme Court to intervene in her legally complicated custody battle. Questions about whether McKenna West should have any authority on the life and care of the baby she carried for nine months continue to swirl as courts in several states attempt to sort out who gets a say over the child’s treatment.
No judicial body so far has a great answer for the situation because the legal system isn’t equipped to adequately address the fact that every surrogacy arrangement, even those that seemingly end well, involves commodifying human lives and violating natural rights.
Mere days after West filed her emergency application, CBS published an article exposing that “Loopholes and shady practices taint U.S. surrogacy industry.” The report highlighted the stories of several women who were paid to gestate babies for elderly couples and foreigners who had covertly commissioned the creation and carrying of multiple children by multiple surrogates.
The Trump administration is enforcing its promises to protect the “meaning and value of American citizenship” by targeting birth tourism schemes exploited by foreigners — mostly people from China. Fox News’ Bill Melugin reported this week that the State Department “revoked more than 2,300 visas in connection with birth tourism since announcing their birth tourism task force last month.”
Yet, the consequences of America’s unmonitored and expansive commercial surrogacy enterprise continue.
One of the women CBS interviewed believed she was providing surrogacy services to “a single father looking to expand his family.” Her suspicions about the rent-a-womb contract mounted when she learned the same man had allegedly hired at least two dozen others to have his children.
“Judy” reportedly pushed to meet the intended parent paying her five times over the course of her pregnancy. It was documents obtained by CBS, however, that ultimately revealed the purchaser was none other than Chinese billionaire Xu Bo.
Bo might be known in China for his fantasy video game empire. In America, however, he’s known as the noncitizen who allegedly purchased more than 100 children (some reports say 300) — all of whom entitled to American citizenship after being born on U.S. soil — by exploiting our nation’s birth tourism weak spots.
The Wall Street Journal noted last year that Bo granted nannies in the U.S. care of his freshly born children because he was too busy in China to be at their births. That factoid is alarmingly reminiscent of the story of Kyla Simpson, who gestated three babies, raised them for months, and even navigated one of their deaths, after the Chinese man who commissioned their creation failed to pick them up at birth.
Bo disputes the exact number of babies he’s commissioned. Yet he’s repeatedly insisted that “having more children can solve all problems.”
In past social media posts, Bo publicly expressed a desire for “50 high-quality sons” and hoped his kids will marry Elon Musk’s offspring. In a recent statement, Bo confessed that his life’s goal, including his mass third-party reproduction strategy, is “to benefit the long-term development of the Chinese nation.”
CBS’s curiosity about the ethical pitfalls that have dominated American commercial surrogacy and the Trump administration’s attempts to address them is a step in the right direction, but it’s simply not enough. Babies and the women who carry them deserve better.
