One afternoon last May, four detectives knocked on the door of a $3.2-million mansion in Arcadia, a wealthy city in Los Angeles County. Earlier that day, they’d received a call about one of the mansion’s residents: a two-month-old baby named Walter. Walter had recently been admitted with severe head injuries to the intensive-care unit of a nearby hospital. His mother said he’d fallen off the bed, but his symptoms were consistent with the kind of trauma one might see from a car accident—or after a prolonged shaking.
When the police entered the mansion, they were surprised to find that it had an institutional feel. There were CCTV cameras everywhere, bedrooms filled with cribs, and, in classrooms downstairs, more than a dozen children seated at desks in front of whiteboards. It was impossible to tell the girls and boys apart, since all of them had shaved heads.
“This was definitely something I’d never seen before,” Sergeant Mario Castro, of the Arcadia Police Department, told me. He thought he’d walked into an unlicensed day care. But Walter’s parents, Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan, insisted that all the children belonged to them. After some counting—and the consulting of an Excel spreadsheet—the officers determined that Silvia and Guojun were the parents of twenty-one children in total, nearly all under the age of three. As the couple explained that evening, this feat had been accomplished by hiring dozens of women across the country as surrogates.
On May 9th, Silvia and Guojun were arrested on suspicion of child endangerment, and their children were taken into foster care. The couple was released three days later, but the children have remained in state custody ever since.
[I]n the short term, is that Silvia and Guojun’s twenty-plus kids will remain in foster care until they are placed into guardianships or adopted, probably by their foster families. Although the parents are challenging the rulings, it seems unlikely that Arcadia’s most infamous family will be brought back together.
Since Silvia and Guojun’s arrest, last May, they have had at least six more children, also through surrogates, bringing their tally to twenty-seven.
Despite the stakes of commercial surrogacy—and its incursion into the most delicate realm of private life—it remains largely unregulated in the U.S.
After news of Silvia and Guojun’s arrest broke last summer, many of their surrogates questioned how the couple’s family-making scheme had been allowed to unfold for years without anyone stopping it. The couple had opened their own agency, Mark Surrogacy, to recruit gestational carriers; dozens of women had been led to believe they were helping the couple have their second or third child.
And yet, besides the alleged child abuse, what the parents had done was perfectly legal. “Incredibly permissive laws make it easy to create children through surrogacy with no regard to their well-being,” Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told me. Most surrogates are extensively vetted by the agencies they sign up with, while most intended parents—that is, the customers paying for their services—are not.
Source: The Fate of Twenty-one Los Angeles Siblings | The New Yorker