COMMENTARY: A report that a Chinese billionaire fathered more than 100 U.S. children poses a monumental human-rights issue.
by Jennifer Roback Morse January 26, 2026, at National Catholic Register
The Wall Street Journal’s recent story on surrogacy exposed U.S.-based baby-sale agencies helping “ultra-wealthy Chinese nationals” sire small armies of offspring around the world. One video-game billionaire, Xu Bo, fathered more than 100 U.S. children. These men want to build business empires with their sons. Catholics and all people of goodwill should be outraged.
As the Journal reports, “a sophisticated international market of American surrogacy agencies, law firms, clinics, delivery agencies and nanny services — even to pick up the newborns from hospitals — has risen to accommodate the demand, permitting parents to ship their genetic material abroad and get a baby delivered back, at a cost of up to $200,000 per child.”
Some Chinese executives intend to marry their daughters off to influential men. One man “purchased dozens of eggs from models, a finance Ph.D. and a musician, at costs ranging from $6,000 to $7,500 each.”
Surrogacy is illegal in China, but virtually unregulated in America. Birthright citizenship means these children will be U.S. citizens, eligible to vote, hold public office, and even run for president. That fact produces a cascade of misguided incentives and problematic outcomes. But I’m more concerned about the human side of this equation.
Xu Bo, a Chinese national, sued in U.S. court via video to assert his parental rights over children he never met, whose mothers he never met, and whose lives he would like to control remotely from China. These children of the surrogacy industry will be raised neither by their genetic mothers nor their birth mothers. It is hard to imagine that children with more than 100 half-siblings will have authentic relationships with a father who did not even appear in person at the court proceedings that would establish his parental rights.
Some time ago, our culture abandoned the bedrock Christian view of children as vulnerable, precious images of God. Society has now deteriorated to the point that children literally are products manufactured to satisfy adult desires. According to the Journal article, “the owner of one surrogacy agency in California said he had helped fill an order for a Chinese parent seeking 100 children in the past few years, a request spread over several agencies.”
Did you catch that? The agency “filled an order” for children.
