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Commercial surrogacy is banned or highly restricted in many countries, including India, China, and most of Western Europe. But no federal laws govern the practice in the United States. Anyone can start a surrogacy agency; unlike opening a hair salon, or a day care, no qualifications are needed for the intimate, unpredictable work of bringing strangers together to create a new life.
In the past decade, a surge of wealthy foreigners—lured by this permissive atmosphere, and by blue-chip medical care—have enlisted American women as surrogates. The majority of these clients use clinics in California, one of the strongholds of the forty-two-billion-dollar global fertility industry. A recent study of U.S. surrogacies found that, between 2014 and 2020, nearly a third of all parents were international. Forty-one per cent of those were from China, whose one-child policy limited family-making until 2016.
Child-welfare cases are confidential. But given that Elliott knew Hays’s full name and birth date—and that she had recently given birth to her—she was able to get through to a caseworker at the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. The caseworker said that one of Silvia and Guojun’s infant sons had recently been hospitalized with head injuries. The baby had twenty siblings, the majority under three years old. All of them, including Hays, had been taken into foster care. As for the rumors about child trafficking, the F.B.I. was looking into them.
As the women gathered online in private groups, they began to trade notes. They knew that, if they were found in breach of their contracts, they could be forced to repay the money they’d earned. But the risk seemed worth taking. They were desperate to understand what had happened to the children—or what was going to happen. Several of the women were still carrying for Silvia and Guojun, with due dates that summer and fall. One described feeling as if she were stranded in the middle of the ocean, pregnant and without a life raft.
Because the surrogates weren’t legally related to the children, the authorities couldn’t share much with them. The Arcadia Police Department said that it was planning to charge the couple with neglect and felony child endangerment, but it was unable to discuss its active investigation.
Stills from videos recorded inside the home showed a makeshift classroom where toddlers sat in rows at tables facing a whiteboard. All the children had shaved heads, and nannies could be seen physically disciplining them: forcing them into squats, spanking them on top of a table, and hitting them in the face. The surrogates searched for the children they’d carried, but the pictures were too blurry to make out individual features.
California is known as a particularly “surrogacy-friendly” destination, not least because it allows intended parents to obtain pre-birth orders, which establish their legal parentage before birth. In other states, however, the rules around surrogacy remain inconsistent or opaque. \
The word around the home office was that Guojun wanted to have as many children as possible to increase the odds of one of them becoming the President of the United States. In addition to Jefferson, several of his kids were named after former U.S. Presidents—a mix of Democrats and Republicans—or prominent foreign leaders.
Another rumor was that Silvia and Guojun “were having kids for the American citizenship benefits and selling them to other people,” Powers told me. After the family’s size was made public, both American and Chinese reporters seized on this idea, raising frenzied questions about whether the couple was engaged in human trafficking.
If anything, the trafficking rumors seemed to distract from the uncomfortable fact that Guojun’s industrialized approach to family-making was perfectly legal—and, among well-heeled élites, increasingly popular.
In China, the video-game billionaire Xu Bo recently issued a statement, in response to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, saying that he has conceived more than a hundred children through surrogacies, with twelve of them carried out in the U.S.
Guojun, for his part, stressed to the World Journal, a Chinese-language newspaper based in New York, that the children “are all ours” and that “none of them are for sale.” He said that he’d always wanted to have a large family, but that it hadn’t been possible under China’s one-child policy.
Rex Zhang, who’d once worked as Guojun’s driver, wasn’t keen to chat, but he wanted me to know that his former boss had a lot of powerful connections, including, he claimed, a friendship with the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. (A spokesperson for the L.A.P.D. denied this.) “Don’t fuck with him,” Zhang said of Guojun. “Be careful.”
Guojun, it turned out, was linked to an elusive criminal figure known as Haoren (Dragon) Ma.
[T]he surrogates looked into filing a lawsuit against Guojun and Silvia—maybe, they hoped, some sort of class action. They asked dozens of lawyers if, given the couple’s misrepresentations, their contracts were still enforceable (the consensus was that they were), and what custody rights, if any, they might be entitled to pursue (the consensus was not many). Attorneys “didn’t want nothing to do with this crap,” Hallie Weaver told me. “I was turned away, turned away, turned away.” After months of dead-end conversations, she ultimately concluded that there was nothing “to protect a surrogate if anything goes wrong.”
Most surrogates lack the funds to hire a private attorney, “so they often find themselves on their own,” Wald said. Elliott talked to many lawyers who told her, sometimes unkindly, that she couldn’t even afford their retainer.
By collecting children the same way they’d collected properties, Silvia and Guojun had reduced a benevolent act to a purely commercial exchange. From a certain perspective, the surrogates had been robbed of the value of their gift.
Source: The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Los Angeles Mansion | The New Yorker
