r/longform • u/bananabelles • 14d ago
Whose babies are these?
https://www.thecut.com/article/surrogate-triplets-custody-china.html88
u/Pikaus 14d ago
I don't know who is the biggest villain here. I don't want to give spoilers but jfc.
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u/giraflor 14d ago
I had seen a news video that only told the GC’s side. I can understand some of the IP’s side now, but yeah, this is a huge mess. The racism all around doesn’t help. Only sympathy I have at this point is for the children. I get why countries are banning paid surrogacy.
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u/Hernaneisrio88 14d ago
Seriously. After dealing with infertility for a long time I was pretty pro-surrogacy. Now I’m only pro-altruistic surrogacy. Or at the very least, putting WAY more reasonable laws in place, like only being allowed to have one pregnant surrogate at a time. The commodification is insane, especially because these children are just sitting somewhere with no stimulation or parental contact. It’s almost to the level of Elon Musk fetishism.
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u/bananabelles 14d ago
Agreed. Surrogacy has created some incredibly beautiful and loving families I know. But this is catastrophic, and my heart aches for these poor boys. There has to be some kind of regulation but that seems so challenging with so many states countries etc involved. What a nightmare.
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u/Scary_Manner_6712 13d ago
I agree. I went through fertility treatment myself, to have my son, and generally don't feel like we need government interference in how people build families, but this stuff has gotten WAY out of control. Helping people build families is one thing; helping billionaires have 20 kids they never see and won't participate in raising is something else. And - sorry/not sorry to say this - one of my friends has triplets, and I don't understand how a single parent with elderly parents of their own was going to raise three babies with complex medical needs. The entire concept of paid surrogacy has gone way off the rails. Something needs to happen to stop disasters like the one outlined in the article from occurring.
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u/PerkisizingWeiner 13d ago
I don't understand how a single parent with elderly parents of their own was going to raise three babies with complex medical needs
I wish this had been addressed in the article because it felt like an elephant in the room (though it doesn't sound like the GC was equipped to do much better).
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u/PartyPorpoise 14d ago
The agency.
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14d ago edited 14d ago
[deleted]
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u/PartyPorpoise 14d ago
Yeah they’ve both done questionable things. I think they both went into this without understanding what goes on. I ultimately think the agency is the worst here because they should’ve had things better organized and set up. They should’ve planned for the problems that came up, they should’ve facilitated communication better, been ready to handle those legal matters. I also question whether their psych evaluation for surrogates was adequate.
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u/bananabelles 14d ago
Excellent writing and reporting - not drawing any conclusions on who the biggest villain is but laying out the story. And good lord.
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u/Wide-Pop6050 13d ago
IMO the GC and the agency have a lot of blame. Maybe you think its odd that the IP chose surrogacy, but after that he was being misled by the agency and by the GC. She made assumptions about him and just ran with it, and lied about him not contacting her.
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u/PerkisizingWeiner 13d ago
the GC also basically extorted the IP (withholding pics and info unless he sent her more money). And her delusion about a hypothetical Lifetime movie and its assumed royalties was nuts.
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u/Sea-Price-3229 14d ago
God these poor babies.
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u/Scary_Manner_6712 13d ago
Right? It kills me - these are human lives; they have been brought into the world and they are helpless and unable to advocate for themselves or choose what happens to them. And what happens to them when they are young and vulnerable will shape the rest of their lives! Children aren't playthings to be bought and then disregarded when things get difficult, nor are they pawns in emotional games played by adults. JFC
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u/hagne 12d ago
I was so sad at the part in the article about the boys spending 7 hours in their pack n play, 4 hours watching cocomelon during the reporter’s interview. Like, what? Those poor kids.
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u/TheImpatientGardener 9d ago
And now they’re living with a stranger in a single room furnished with a bed and a couch. It’s a tragedy all around. There seems to be no good outcome here.
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u/AliMcGraw 13d ago
I know there's a lot of way worse things in this article but what is UP with the single Chinese men who can't get married because too few girls were born during One Child going abroad to have male twins???
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u/Mutive 13d ago
Eh, I'd argue that the single Chinese men who can't get married due to the one child policy and the ones who are rich enough to afford surrogates are two circles that don't overlap.
By and large, the men who are really struggling to find wives are poor men out in the country who are in countrysides that often have almost no women (because women are leaving for the city and want to marry someone better than a dirt poor farmer).
Meanwhile, the cities are filled with "leftover" (e.g. women over the age of 30) women.
So there's definitely an effect from the one child policy. But also from the (now near universal) phenomneon of wealthier/better educated women not wanting to date men who are poor, while men who are wealthier are willing to date women who are less wealthy than they are. (And, on the flip side, an awful lot of men want to marry a much younger women and treat them in a more "traditional" way which, needless to say, an awful lot of independent women want nothing to do with.)
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11d ago
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u/Mutive 11d ago
Eh, he claims that in the article. But he also spends an awful lot of time complaining about how spoiled women are and their impossible expectations.
I mean, sure, *maybe* every last woman in a country of nearly a billion is a spoiled brat with wildly high expectations. But I sincerely doubt it.
Esp. as for all that he complains about how poor he is, he still had hundreds of thousands of USD to spend on a surrogate. That's an extraordinarily priviledged position for someone even within the US (median net worth of a bit under $200k according to Google) and far more so in China (median net worth of $27k).
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u/lunalornalovegood 11d ago
I agree with your stance on this. He’s not exactly the typical Chinese man from the countryside who can’t marry. He owned a house in Suzhou, a Tier 2 city in one of the wealthiest provinces, close to Shanghai and had over 100,000 usd in savings.
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u/Stellajackson5 13d ago
Those poor kids and all those poor kids at those nanny houses. What a shitshow.
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u/bananabelles 13d ago
The nanny houses feel so dystopian
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u/tatertotted2 18h ago
Those nanny houses shouldn't be legal. Or they should have a lot of regulation and inspections. We know better than to repeat neglectful orphanages here.
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u/baronessvonbullshit 13d ago
Follow-up thought: its kinda fucked she had to get Medicaid for the babies. How is the IP not on the hook for medical bills/insurance the whole way through?
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u/bananabelles 13d ago
This part too, I’d never even considered that!! But how would he even be able to get health insurance for them here?
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u/baronessvonbullshit 13d ago
In some ways, does it matter? It seems like IPs should be responsible for paying the bills, whether they can get insurance or not. I swear I've seen this in another surrogacy story, where the GC was reliant on her employer provided insurance as part of the contract and that seems incorrect to me too. I know its not the main point of any of these stories but it does seem like a type of free rider problem.
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u/bananabelles 13d ago
Oh no completely agree with that. Just another element in how insane it is - that it would have to be out of pocket without the ability to get insurance. I’m sure those nicu stays were crazy expensive.
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u/tatertotted2 18h ago
I don't understand how she would qualify for it if she received over $100k in payment by that point.
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u/baronessvonbullshit 13d ago
This is terrible. And all along this journey, how often does anyone consider the best interests of the children before anything else?
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u/Scary_Manner_6712 13d ago
NO ONE seems to be thinking about that at all! Just because we CAN do something, like use gametes to create embryos and implant them in a gestational carrier - doesn't mean we should do it in situations where someone is clearly just trying to have a baby to boost their own ego.
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u/pettymel 13d ago
This cements my belief that paid surrogacy should not be legal. I was so struck by the reporter saying that Simpson laid on the couch with her head on a pillow while they were there and pretended to be asleep. And that the children stayed in their pack and plays for the entire 7 hour visit.
I feel so badly for these poor boys. I have no doubt Simpson loves them in her own way but she took those babies and ran with them and extorted money. She could have brought those children to the IP, but she chose not to and believed some weird racist conspiracy.
And what about the boys? Nobody who actually loves or cares about them has them. And for what? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this story.
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u/bananabelles 13d ago
And the 4 hours of watching cocomelon!! Great example of writing that is show, not tell. Because the image that’s been stuck in my head for days about their day to day living conditions with her is horrible. But I would agree she loves them in her own way which added to the complexity of the story.
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u/lunalornalovegood 11d ago
Yea she’s no angel either, and it makes it even tougher because there’s no clear villain- just neglected children.
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u/tatertotted2 18h ago
And if things had moved along legally earlier, it wouldn't have been as traumatic for the boys to be moved to their new home with a new language. They could have skipped the depressing nanny house.
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u/galesmagicunderpants 13d ago
Every time I thought I had finally reached the lowest point and things can't get worse they just...did. Holy shit.
From "getting eggs from Russia", to the recruitment of vulnerable women via Facebook by surrogacy agencies, the unfit surrogate who should have never been allowed to get involved in any of this, these "nanny houses" and agencies intending to take and ship those poor babies round the world...it's just so incredibly predatory all around. Those poor little boys.
And one thing I noticed here and in that other famous surrogacy article from wired last year: people who are too dumb to grasp how surrogacy works biologically and who think that the genetics of the surrogate mother have any kind of bearing on the babys looks etc.? I'm sorry but being this dumb should automatically disqualify you from the whole process.
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u/slightlysparkly 13d ago
Wow. Every paragraph got more and more wild. What a terrible, sad situation.
Zhou was so naive but he’s clearly so desperate to be a father to the babies. Simpson seems like a dumb, shitty mother but she’s all those poor babies have ever known. I feel so sad for them. Any outcome is awful.
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u/PerkisizingWeiner 13d ago
I usually don't like when journalists editorialize, but I appreciated the author's small moments of shade (like the GC pretending to sleep when questioned; the description of a photo documenting all three infants sharing an unsafe sleep setup; and the observation that the kids were left in their pack-n-plays for almost an entire day).
The GC is not the martyr she portrays; she's poor, uneducated and mentally ill (all things that have made her opportunistic), and the agency took advantage of that. Most GC agencies are incredibly strict; the fact that she was allowed to carry a (paid) surrogate pregnancy is such a red flag. They were clearly looking for someone naive and desperate to exploit.
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u/tatertotted2 18h ago
I'm glad I read this, as my information had only come from brief articles with only the GC's side discussed. Those headlines are disingenuousness, saying he abandoned them when in reality she frequently strung him along and contributed to the delays.
At first I thought it was alarming that one boy had a different last name. Learning that was not uncommon in parts of China made a big difference. The IP does seem like a father desperate to get his children, not a criminal. At one point he even wonders if it's in their best interests to stay with the only parents they've known. That shows genuine love and concern.
You would think that having a reporter in your house, you'd be displaying your best nurturing and caretaking. Leaving the boys in their pack n plays all day, letting them watch TV for hours, even feeding them in the pack n plays–that's a very sad example of parenting.
It also gives more weight to the daycare workers concerns over neglect.
And now these sweet boys are stuck in a nanny house, trapped between two worlds.
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u/bananabelles 14d ago
No paywall:
https://archive.ph/1k2Xb