BEIJING: A surrogate mother gave birth to a baby boy in China four years after his parents died in a car crash, Chinese media reported.
The deceased couple was undergoing fertility treatments before the fatal accident in 2013. Their parents fought a drawn-out legal battle to gain access to the couple’s fertilised embryos, kept in a hospital in Nanjing. The baby boy — nicknamed “Tiantian”, or “sweet” in Mandarin — was born on December 9 to a Laotian surrogate, The Beijing Newsreported on Tuesday.
Surrogacy is illegal in China, forcing those who can afford it to look for potential options abroad. Laos has become the latest nation in Asia to witness a flourishing but legally opaque commercial surrogacy industry.
The grandparents had to clear several hurdles to transport the embryos out of China and prove the paternity and nationality of the baby once he was born.
“First we thought of using air freight, but none of the airlines were willing to take the thermos-sized bottle of liquid nitrogen where the four embryos were stored,”
Liu Baojun, a surrogacy expert who assisted the families, said.
So the families decided to transport their precious cargo by road to Laos.
The next problem was getting the baby back into China. Children born through surrogacy outside the country need to have a DNA test proving that one of the biological parents is a Chinese national. The surrogate was brought to China on a tourist visa and gave birth in a
Guangzhou hospital. The child was kept there for 15 days, until all four grandparents gave blood and DNA tests, establishing the baby was their grandson and that both parents were Chinese nationals.
The ruling that allows parents to inherit frozen embryos created by their children has triggered a debate on Chinese social media. Dozens of commentators said it highlights the plight of parents who have lost their only child under China’s controversial one-child policy while others discussed the need to legalise surrogacy.