THE SURROGACY STORY NOBODY SHOULD SHRUG OFF
There are news stories that make you stop and ask what the fuck you just read.
This is one of them.
An American woman agreed to become a surrogate for a single father who wanted a large family.
Okay.
Then, according to reporting about a CBS News investigation, she learned that the intended father was Xu Bo, a Chinese billionaire and video-game executive who has reportedly used American surrogacy on an extraordinary scale.
And CBS News reportedly broke that news to her.
Read that again.
The woman carrying his child apparently didn't fully understand who the fuck she was carrying it for.
She said she felt “blindsided” and “misled.” She reportedly tried five times to meet the intended father and was unsuccessful. She also said she had been told that he was simultaneously using close to two dozen surrogates.
And somehow, that's not even the craziest part of this story.
HOW MANY FUCKING CHILDREN ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
This is where we need to be precise because the numbers are disputed.
Xu's former partner, who has been involved in litigation with him, alleged that he had 300 children.
Xu's company disputed that figure.
But according to reporting, the company's response said that after years of U.S. surrogacy, Xu had “only a little over 100” children.
Only.
A little.
Over.
One hundred.
Meanwhile, Xu has separately said he has custody of 12 children born through surrogacy in the United States.
So I'm not going to tell you Xu has 300 children as though that's an established fact. It isn't.
I'm also not going to pretend that makes the underlying story normal.
Because more than 100 is already fucking insane.
AND THEN THERE'S THE COURTROOM
Employees in a Los Angeles family court reportedly noticed Xu's name appearing repeatedly in surrogacy petitions. He was seeking parental rights to at least four unborn children, while court research reportedly indicated he'd already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more through surrogates.
A judge called him into a confidential hearing.
According to reporting based on people who attended that hearing, Xu said he hoped to have roughly 20 American-born children through surrogacy who could eventually take over his business.
He reportedly preferred boys.
Several of the children were reportedly being cared for by nannies in Irvine while awaiting paperwork to travel to China.
And according to people cited in the reporting, Xu told the judge he hadn't met them yet because he was busy with work.
I'm sorry.
What the actual fuck are we doing?
THIS ISN'T A FUCKING AMAZON ORDER
I support adults having enormous freedom to build their families.
I understand why surrogacy exists.
There are women who desperately want children and cannot carry them. There are couples who have spent years dealing with infertility. There are families for whom a surrogate gives them something they thought they would never have.
That's not what I'm attacking.
I'm asking where the fucking guardrails are.
Because when one wealthy individual can apparently arrange pregnancy after pregnancy after pregnancy through American women, at what point does somebody responsible for oversight ask what the hell is happening?
Apparently a California court eventually did.
Why did it take a court employee seeing the same fucking name over and over?
Why wasn't the system designed to notice first?
AND WHAT EXACTLY DOES A SURROGATE HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW?
This may be the part that bothers me most.
The woman CBS called “Judy” reportedly entered surrogacy partly because she wanted financial security for herself and her seven-year-old daughter.
She knew the intended parent wanted a large family. She apparently learned that he was using many surrogates.
But she told reporters she tried repeatedly to meet him.
And then CBS reportedly had to tell her who he was and about the much larger story surrounding him.
At one point she reportedly asked a question that should stop everyone cold:
Does she even have a right to know?
Jesus Christ.
She is growing another human being inside her body.
She's accepting the physical risks of pregnancy.
She's giving birth to a child who will leave the hospital with somebody else.
And we're debating whether she deserves meaningful information about who that somebody is?
That's fucking backwards.
Surrogates aren't incubators.
They're women.
If informed consent means anything, then information that could materially affect a woman's decision to become pregnant for somebody else should not be treated like an inconvenient detail in a business transaction.
MONEY CANNOT BE THE ONLY FUCKING QUALIFICATION
This is where surrogacy becomes uncomfortable because it forces us to talk about something Americans generally don't like talking about:
What should money actually be allowed to buy?
A billionaire can buy a mansion.
A billionaire can buy a yacht.
A billionaire can buy ten fucking yachts.
Fine.
But children aren't luxury goods.
Women aren't manufacturing capacity.
And pregnancy isn't a production process that should scale indefinitely simply because somebody has enough money to keep signing contracts.
The question isn't whether rich people are allowed to have children.
Of course they are.
The question is whether our commercial surrogacy system has become so transactional that extraordinary wealth can overwhelm whatever ethical guardrails were supposed to exist.
Because there is a profound difference between helping somebody become a parent and creating what begins to look like industrial-scale reproduction.
AND YES, THE FACT THAT THESE CHILDREN ARE AMERICAN-BORN MATTERS
This part is politically explosive, so let's say exactly what we know and exactly what we don't.
Xu is Chinese.
The arrangements reportedly involved American surrogacy.
He reportedly told a California court that he wanted roughly 20 American-born children through surrogacy to eventually take over his business.
Those facts raise legitimate questions about citizenship, international surrogacy, parentage and whether American law was ever designed for reproductive arrangements operating at this scale.
That does not prove espionage.
It does not prove some Chinese government operation.
It does not prove Xu committed a crime.
I'm not going to manufacture a conspiracy theory when the actual fucking facts are bizarre enough.
But “we don't have evidence of a crime” cannot be the end of the conversation.
Government oversight exists precisely because sometimes conduct can expose a massive hole in the law before somebody can point to a criminal statute and say it was violated.
THIS APPARENTLY ISN'T JUST ONE BILLIONAIRE
CBS interviewed 32 surrogates for its broader investigation into the industry.
All 32 reportedly underwent embryo transfers in California, although some lived elsewhere, and some women said they hadn't known intended parents were using multiple surrogates simultaneously.
An attorney experienced in surrogacy told the investigation that there are no laws limiting how many surrogates intended parents can use simultaneously.
There it fucking is.
That's the story.
Not China.
Not billionaires.
Not even Xu Bo.
The system.
Because eventually someone was going to discover what could be done with enough money inside a system without meaningful limits.
Apparently somebody did.
SOMEBODY NEEDS TO START ASKING QUESTIONS
I don't know whether Xu Bo violated American law.
Neither does anybody reading a news article.
That's why investigations exist.
But after everything that's been reported, federal and state authorities should be able to answer some basic questions.
Were these arrangements lawful?
Were surrogates adequately informed?
Who vetted the intended parents?
What information was withheld?
How many simultaneous pregnancies can one intended parent commission?
What happens to the children before they're transferred overseas?
Who ensures their welfare?
What safeguards exist against trafficking or exploitation?
And if the answer to some of those questions is nobody, then congratulations:
We found the fucking problem.
Because there should never be a point where an American woman discovers from a television news organization that the child growing inside her is apparently one of potentially scores of children commissioned by the same billionaire.
Surrogacy is supposed to help people create families.
It is not supposed to turn financially vulnerable women into anonymous production lines for whoever has the deepest pockets.
And children are not collectibles.
They're not investments.
They're not corporate succession planning.
They're human fucking beings.
Whether Xu has 12 children in his custody, more than 100 children through surrogacy, or whether his former partner's allegation of 300 ever proves true, the precise number doesn't resolve the fundamental question.
It makes the question impossible to ignore:
How the fuck did we build a system where this could happen in the first place?