Power, wealth, and surrogacy Biology’s international fault lines

By: Greg Maresca

A striking headline can distill an entire saga into a single timeless line without a plot or nuance; just pure drama etched in ink.

Case in point: the New York Post’s legendary April 15, 1983, masterpiece, “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” proving, once again, truth is stranger than fiction.  

Recently, a similar but more discerning headline ran in The Wall Street Journal: The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of U.S.-Born Babies Via Surrogate. Chinese billionaires are using surrogacy laws in the United States to construct family dynasties, while raising significant ethical, legal, and national security concerns in the process.

The most prolific case that highlighted this growing and largely unregulated surrogacy marketplace was that of Xu Bo, a billionaire Chinese video game mogul who has fathered over 100 children. 

Yes, you read that right.

Xu treats his offspring as business assets saying he favors “superior” male children.  Xu is having these boys raised by nannies and eventually sent to China to run his businesses a stark exploitation of both surrogacy and the children themselves.

Yet silence from American feminists.

Surrogacy is considered a legal way to build a family for those couples who cannot conceive. However, the scale of these efforts and their underlying motivations by foreign nationals pose troubling implications for a moral and thus civil society.

At the core is the ethical problem of commodifying reproduction that has seemingly evolved into a marketplace for the wealthy, who exploit loose American laws through “regulatory arbitrage.”

Such extremes are a troubling trend: the wealthy treating surrogacy like a mail order catalog by hiring multiple surrogates that meet expectations in order to engineer a “superior” bloodline for personal and business interests.

America should not be a global haven for surrogacy when it risks reducing parenthood to a business transaction. The legal stakes are high: the 14th Amendment of the Constitution grants automatic U.S. citizenship to anyone born on American soil, so children born here via surrogacy receive citizenship, which defies the amendment’s intended purpose.

Realizing what is at stake, Sen. Rick Scott introduced the SAFE?KIDS Act to stop foreign nationals from exploiting birthright citizenship and address related national security concerns. The bill would void such contracts and impose penalties on brokers facilitating these agreements.

As marriage and the family are deconstructed and redefined, the demand for surrogacy will only increase as the great theological bait-and-switch. Instead of a baby being the fruit of marital love, it becomes the product of a business transaction.

Surrogacy strips women of identity, casting them as mere “carriers” – a corporate label that commodifies life itself, ready to be bought, sold, or discarded at will in an ever-changing world where convenience is king.

The womb is rented out, the contract notarized, and just like that the most intimate mystery of human existence takes on the feel of an Amazon Prime delivery. A woman’s body is treated as a means rather than an end where motherhood becomes just another side hustle of the gig economy rather than a lifetime vocation.  

Children are gifts, not entitlements.

No one has a right to have a child.

Surrogacy flips that script, making the child the fulfillment of a want rather than a divine gift. Parenthood is reception, not acquisition. To frame human birth as the outcome of a contract perverts the meaning of family, while violating natural law. 

Human life is not a service you can outsource like lawn care.

Humanity is made in the image and likeness of God, and as such life must be safeguarded from conception to natural death.  Life’s integrity, dignity, and mystery is a gift from God that cannot be contracted.

When society loses sight of this truth, its foundation crumbles and the weight of its impending collapse falls on everyone – Chinese billionaires included.