Katherine Long

Once this child is born, you, the parents, have the parental rights to the child.

You are clear to put your name on the birth certificate.

No.

Typically, these are, you know, I hesitate to say rubber-stamped, but it's a fairly simple process.

A man named Shu Bo had put his name on at least four applications for parental rights for children who were as yet unborn but were being carried by surrogates.

The clerks thought that was a little strange.

It's not terribly common to have that many simultaneous surrogacies.

They started poking around and they realized that in addition to those at least four children, Shubo already had or was in the process of having eight other children.

It was certainly unusual.

When we started speaking with people who work in this corner of the surrogacy industry that caters to Chinese parents, something that we kept hearing was concerns about a small number of Chinese parents who seem to want to have extremely large numbers of children.

When I first heard about this, I thought this had to be an exaggeration.

This had to be made up.

But then we started looking into it and it turned out to be true.

Is this why you have so many children?

Yeah.

You know, gotta practice what I preach.

One attorney said his client was a billionaire Chinese parent with 20 children.

Another surrogacy agency owner said that he had helped fill an order for over 100 children born through surrogacy.

At least they seem to be trying to, yeah.

How is this possible?