Chapter 1: What legal processes are involved in surrogacy?
It was 2023, and inside an LA family court, clerks were working through some documents. They're what's known as parentage petitions. If you've enlisted a surrogate to carry your baby, then you need a judge to approve your parentage petition in order to actually take the baby home. It's basically the court saying, yes, this kid is legally yours.
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.
That's investigative reporter Katherine Long. And are these usually contentious petitions?
No. Typically, these are, you know, I hesitate to say rubber-stamped, but it's a fairly simple process.
But this time, the clerks noticed something. one name kept showing up over and over again.
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 same guy, Shu Bo, was applying for parental rights to at least four babies being carried by surrogates.
The clerks thought that was a little strange.
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Chapter 2: Who is Xu Bo and why is he notable in the surrogacy industry?
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.
That's 12 kids total. 12 kids, all born via surrogacy, all with the same father. This sounds crazy.
It was certainly unusual.
When Catherine and her colleagues started digging into the surrogacy industry, they got curious about one particular corner of that business. The corner that serves wealthy Chinese parents.
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.
Think 10 children, 20 children, even, I kid you not, 100 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.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen.
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Chapter 3: What cultural factors influence Chinese parents seeking surrogacy?
It's Friday, March 20th. Coming up, another story from our investigation into the fertility industry. Today, one dad, 100 babies. In many countries around the world, surrogacy is illegal. So international parents looking to have a baby this way often head to the U.S., These days, about 40% of U.S. surrogacies are for parents from abroad.
And about 40% of those parents come from just one country, China.
You've got to understand the Chinese policy. A single woman cannot get fertility treatment in China. You cannot do sex selection in China. And gay is not legally recognized in China.
That's Nathan Zhang. He runs a business that helps Chinese parents access the U.S. fertility industry, which many consider to be the best in the world.
Chapter 4: How is the surrogacy industry structured to accommodate wealthy clients?
For the IVF fertility clinical side, U.S. is like the NBA in the basketball field. Those are the best players, physicians, and lab technicians and biologists, and also the...
Nathan's business is basically a concierge service. He hooks Chinese customers up with IVF clinics, egg donors, sperm banks, surrogacy agencies, and lawyers. When he got into the industry about 15 years ago, Nathan says he catered to a pretty niche demographic, rich Chinese business people who'd tried having kids the traditional way and failed.
But more recently, he told me, his customer base has expanded. He sees more gay couples now, more single women, and more wealthy clients looking to build big families. So our colleagues have been reporting on this trend of Chinese customers, often who are very rich, who want lots of babies. Have you seen that in your business?
Yeah, we saw a lot, just actually traditional Chinese. We already have bigger families, and my grandparents have seven siblings on my father's side, and my grandfather, my grandmother has like six siblings. But it just, that's the Chinese traditional culture.
Nathan says that while traditional Chinese culture might be a motivation for some of his clients, he suspects that some of his wealthiest customers are taking their cues from someone else, the wealthiest man in the world. If people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble.
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Chapter 5: What are the costs associated with surrogacy in the U.S.?
Mark my words. That's Elon Musk at a Wall Street Journal event a few years ago.
Is this why you have so many children?
I'm trying to set a good example.
Yeah. You know, gotta practice what I preach.
Elon Musk is a model for the Chinese, especially for Chinese entrepreneurs. Elon Musk has 14 kids. I think it's a dramatic inspiration for Chinese businessmen.
— Nathan told me about this one time, when a single Chinese businessman reached out to him. — I do have a potential client. They want 200 kids. You had a client who said they wanted 200 kids? Yeah. How did you react when they requested that?
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Chapter 6: What challenges do surrogates face in this industry?
I was happy at the beginning because it's a business. Think about, you know, it's a business. But if you come down, you say, hey, first question I ask is, that's a single guy. Who's going to take care of the kid? And he said, my sister. And I said, oh.
Nathan didn't take the man as a client. And after that, he says he instituted a new policy.
We only help families to have three kids, no more than three kids, and no more than two at the same time. Why is that your policy? I just feel it's a lot of work. I have two kids, and I got a lot of joy by spending time with them. I understand the joy for the family, but you got to be responsible.
What Nathan experienced with that potential client isn't an isolated case. When my colleague Catherine Long started calling people in the industry, she heard a few different stories like this.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of unregulated surrogacy practices?
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.
A single person had 100 children through surrogacy?
At least they seem to be trying to, yeah. How is this possible? It's possible because there's a network of companies that are designed to cater to the whims of the very rich that are operating in a space nearly wholly devoid of regulation.
Despite the fact that surrogacy is a multi-billion dollar industry, there are no federal laws regulating it. And that's created a thriving cottage industry, catering to almost any desire a wealthy parent could have. It means that nowadays, if you've got the money and you want a bunch of babies born all at once, you can get that in the U.S., and you don't even have to be here to do it.
Here's how it works. It all starts, of course, with sperm and an egg. That could be collected in an IVF clinic in, say, Hong Kong or Japan.
that would be shipped over to an IVF clinic in the United States. An embryo might be created and then transferred into a surrogate in California.
Nine months later, that surrogate gives birth, at which point another business steps in.
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Chapter 8: How many children does Xu Bo reportedly have, and what are the controversies surrounding it?
We've spoken with a few surrogates who've said that the children they carried and gave birth to were ultimately picked up at the hospital, not by the parents, but by nannies or people carrying power of attorney documentation.
Those credentialed baby couriers might then deliver the infant to a house. Inside that house could be other surrogate babies, all being cared for by nannies.
They may take care of them for a couple of months. And once the child's travel documents are ready, the nanny will help bring the child back to China and reunite it with his parents.
And thanks to the 14th Amendment, that baby would also be a U.S. citizen. How much can this whole process cost?
This can easily cost well over $150,000. We're looking at $200,000 is pretty typical.
And if people want to do this, there isn't much standing in their way. Other than perhaps a few sharp-eyed clerks at an L.A. courthouse. Up next, the strange case of Shu Boe. Clerks at that L.A. family court knew a few things about Shubo, the guy whose name kept appearing on those parentage petitions.
He was applying for parental rights to at least four babies, babies who would soon be born via surrogacy. The clerks also knew that Shubo already had or was in the process of having eight more kids via surrogate. That number of children raised a red flag for family court judge Amy Pellman, so the judge called for a hearing. Shubo, it turns out, is a tech entrepreneur who lives in China.
So he joined the hearing remotely.
And the judge starts asking questions and Shubo starts answering them. And he says that ultimately he hopes to have as many as 20 children. He says he wants to have all boys because they're superior to girls. He says that he hopes his children will grow up to inherit his business empire.
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