baby boy in China four years after his parents
died in a car crash, Chinese media reported.
The deceased couple was undergoing treatments.
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
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.
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