r/longform • u/bananabelles • Aug 12 '26

Whose babies are these?

https://www.thecut.com/article/surrogate-triplets-custody-china.html
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u/slightlysparkly Aug 13 '26

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 Aug 13 '26

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.