A Booming Fertility Industry and its Objectification of Children
Two major reports this week have drawn attention to the horrors of the commercial surrogacy industry.
On Dec. 13, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an exposé on Chinese videogame billionaire Xu Bo, who has allegedly fathered more than 100 children using the services of paid surrogates.
Bo has done this not in one of the loosely regulated developing nations that have become havens for predatory surrogacy firms, but rather right here, in the United States.
According to the WSJ, Bo’s ambition is to raise a large number of boys, with the goal of having the best of them take over his business.
Bo isn’t the only Chinese billionaire to take advantage of lax surrogacy regulations in the United States to purchase large numbers of children.
These billionaires are bent on establishing large “dynasties.” It’s a bonus that the children they are producing (purchasing) are being born in the United States to U.S.-based surrogates and may, therefore, automatically be given U.S. citizenship. This potential of U.S. citizenship for these children could provide them with legal and financial advantages.
Morally Unphased Scheme
Bo seems completely unphased by the media attention being given to his disturbing practice of fathering children, acquiring them through surrogacy and the technology provided by the booming fertility industry. Sadly, he seems to have no intentions of pursuing an authentic fatherly relationship with these children. It is simply a business transaction.
According to reports, he has publicly boasted on social media about the large number of children he has, calling himself “China’s first father.” He has also apparently publicly fantasized about some of his children marrying some of Elon Musk’s children. Tellingly, he has not made time to go to California to meet several of the latest children born bearing his name.
And it turns out the situation might even be worse than what the WSJ confirmed. One of Bo’s ex-girlfriends claims that he has sired more than 300 children. Recently, a California judge denied Bo paternal status in the case of several surrogate children, leaving those children in legal limbo, without a legal parent.
Another Chinese billionaire reportedly fathered ten daughters through surrogacy, using eggs harvested from women with desirable traits, including a model, a finance PhD and a musician. His goal? To raise daughters who can be married off to powerful men, thus aligning his family with other powerful families.
The WSJ reports that one Chinese businessman told a U.S.-based agency that he wanted to father, “purchase” 200 children.
Tragically, some of these individuals have been inspired by Elon Musk’s deeply misguided efforts to fight depopulation by having large numbers of children with numerous women, including through in vito fertilization (IVF).
The New York Times Exposes Surrogacy Nightmare
Meanwhile, the day after The Wall Street Journal published its exposé, The New York Times published its own devastating and lengthy exposé of the abuses that are rampant within the commercial surrogacy industry.
You can get the flavor of the whole exposé from the first paragraph:
The women in House 3 rarely had a chance to speak to the women in House 5, but when they did, the things they heard scared them. They didn’t actually know where House 5 was, only that it was huge and perched somewhere outside Tbilisi, on one of the many hills that surround the Georgian capital. They heard that there were hundreds of pregnant women in House 5, crammed many to a room. They heard that there was limited food in House 5’s communal kitchen — the pork, rice and vegetables their bosses were supposed to provide daily were in short supply — and so the women of House 5 had to fight one another for vegetables or go hungry.
The article details the horrific conditions at “baby mills” in the Eastern European country of Georgia, as well as in Thailand, where surrogacy regulations are lax, and whatever regulations there are, they are poorly policed.
Impoverished women from all over the world, desperate to make a living, respond to alluring ads promising them lucrative payments for nine months of “work.” What they find, instead, are houses packed with women that are owned by business owners whose overarching goal is to extract as much profit from each woman as possible.
The result is often indistinguishable from slavery. Living conditions are often poor. Agencies rope women into complex contracts, leaving the women confused about how much they are owed, and what rights they have over their own bodies. And if a woman becomes uncomfortable with the process, she is often forced to pay the agency owners supposed “costs” to be able to leave and go home.
Media Breaks Through Their Blindness
One of the rare satisfactions of being a pro-life and pro-family activist is witnessing leftist thinkers and institutions suddenly wake up to realities that the pro-life movement has been warning them about for years, even decades.
In recent years, we have witnessed this phenomenon occurring in the case of gender ideology, euthanasia, and the coming population implosion.
Suddenly even extremely liberal nations are passing regulations on so-called transgender “treatments,” recognizing that children’s bodies are being permanently mutilated based upon ideas peddled by ideology-crazed activists and which are completely unsupported by scientific research.
Similarly, the mainstream media is increasingly paying attention to the impossible-to-ignore stories of sick, elderly, impoverished, homeless, or mentally ill individuals being pushed towards taking their lives by health systems that have embraced death as a quicker and cheaper alternative to actual healthcare.
And, after decades of beating the drum about so-called overpopulation, governments, NGOs, and the media are suddenly realizing that most affluent Western and Asian nations are below-replacement birth rates, and that population implosion will be catastrophic at the social and economic perspective.
Now, we are finally seeing journalistic attention being given to the surrogacy industry.
It’s years too late. These abuses have happening for a long time, and were entirely predictable given the anti-human, technocratic logic of commercial surrogacy. But better late than never!
The UN Validates the Catholic Church’s Stance
The Catholic Church has consistently taught that procreation belongs within the life-long, loving union of a husband and wife. While there is no perfection on this earth, the evidence is myriad that children are most likely to thrive within the traditional, nuclear family. And society, in general, is best served by strong families.
Furthermore, the Church has warned that ideologies and technologies that seek to replace natural procreation with any number of other arrangements will inevitably harm women, children, families, and society, and lower the overall respect for human life in society, with dire consequences (see, Humanae vitae, no 17).
Early on the Catholic Church pointed to the ethical nightmare that is in vitro fertilization (IVF). Even within the “ideal” circumstance, in which a married couple is making recourse to IVF to overcome infertility out of a perfectly understandable desire to welcome a family, the ethical problems with IVF are insurmountable (The Catholic Church teaches the use of IVF is always morally impermissible – see, The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2377 and Dignitas personae.).
However, even more dystopian is what happens when IVF is used in the context of surrogacy. Tragically, despite the self-evident opportunities for abuses, numerous governments, including the U.S. federal government and various states, have permitted not just the practice of surrogacy, but commercial surrogacy, in which women are paid to carry the children of people who might be buying the child for any number of nefarious or disturbed reasons.
Commercial surrogacy is so fraught with opportunity for abuse, that even the United Nations recently issued a report calling for the complete banning of all surrogacy (not just commercial surrogacy) globally. In the strongest possible language, the UN report condemned commercial surrogacy as a form of modern-day “slavery.” The New York Times exposé leaves no room for doubt about the accuracy of the conclusions of the UN report.
Holy Innocence
In the final years of his life, Pope Francis repeatedly condemned the surrogacy industry in the strongest possible terms. In one speech in January of 2024, the Holy Father called for the global banning of the “despicable” practice of surrogacy.
Surrogacy, he said, “represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.” He added that a child is “never the basis of a commercial contract.”
The thing that is so striking about the commercial surrogacy industry is how little attention is being paid to the children conceived through surrogacy contracts, who are being objectified, essentially being produced on an industrial scale. Money, power, and prestige, rather than care and concern for children, are behind this whole “birth tourism” nightmare unfolding in the United States, and other surrogacy-friendly jurisdictions like Georgia, Ukraine, and Thailand.
As the author of an article on Fudzilla puts it, “The [surrogacy] industry’s own ethical guidelines suggest limiting parents to two [children] at a time, but the punishment for ignoring that advice is little more than being kicked out of a trade group. As long as the money keeps flowing, the moral brakes barely work.”
Thus, children are brought into the world without any hope of having a normal, loving relationships with one or both of their parents.
Some misguided admirers of Elon Musk have attempted to portray him as a good father to his (at least) 14 children, born to (at least) 4 different women. But how can any man truly be a good, present father to children scattered around the country, and who has no meaningful relationship with the children’s mothers?
This dystopian situation is only that much worse in the case of these wealthy Chinese individuals producing and buying children in bulk, sometimes by the dozens and then dumping them into the care of full-time nannies halfway across the globe, apparently primarily driven by economic and political motives.
Life is a Gift
The surrogacy industry has commercialized the bodies of woman and their children. Human children are being treated like common property, bought for the right price. The purpose of their lives is being subordinated to the desires of their purchasers, who are not seeking relationship, but rather some form of benefit.
God only knows how catastrophic the effects will be upon the hearts and minds of these children, who, like every human being, desire nurture, intimacy, and love, but are being denied these things by a corrupt system driven by greed.
As always, it’s time to go back to the basics. As The Catechism of the Church explains it,
A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The “supreme gift of marriage” is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged “right to a child” would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right “to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents,” and “the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception” (no. 2378).
No more be said. If our society followed this straightforward, but rich moral worldview, the nightmare of commercial surrogacy would never have had the opportunity to occur. Let us hope that governments wise up and begin passing common sense laws to stop this horrific degradation of human life.
Human Life International
As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.
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