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Baby in China is born to surrogate 4 years after his parents' deaths

HONG KONG -- After a long legal battle in China with no known precedent, a surrogate mother has given birth to a boy four years after his parents died in a car crash, a local newspaper has reported.

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By
AUSTIN RAMZY
, New York Times

HONG KONG — After a long legal battle in China with no known precedent, a surrogate mother has given birth to a boy four years after his parents died in a car crash, a local newspaper has reported.

Shen Jie and Liu Xi, a couple in the eastern Chinese city of Yixing, tried without success to conceive in the first two years of their marriage. They decided to pursue in vitro fertilization, but on March 20, 2013, five days before the embryos were to be implanted, they were killed in a car crash, Beijing News reported Tuesday in an article detailing the court battle that followed.

The husband and wife were both only children, and the couple’s parents resolved to use surrogacy to continue the family line. Surrogacy is illegal in China and the first obstacle for the families was obtaining the embryos.

The parents of the dead couple repeatedly visited the hospital in Nanjing where the frozen embryos were stored, but senior hospital officials repeatedly refused to meet with them. So the parents tried a new strategy and one pair sued the other.

“The risk of suing the hospital was too great,” Shen Xinnian, the father of Shen, told the newspaper.

While the first court rejected the suit, a second ruled in their favor. “The only carrier of the two families’ blood lines carries the burden of their grieving memories and consolation,” the Wuxi People’s Intermediate Court said.

Hospitals are not permitted to transfer embryos to individuals, so the families found a surrogacy agency that works with a hospital in Laos. In December 2016, the surrogacy agency received the embryos, which it drove to Laos in early 2017.

A 27-year-old Laotian was chosen as the surrogate and doctors at a hospital in Laos implanted two of the embryos. Before the child was born, the surrogate was taken to China on a tourist visa. The boy was born Dec. 9, 2017, in Guangzhou.

Hu Xingxian, his maternal grandmother, gave him the name Tiantian, or Sweet Sweet.

“His eyes look like my daughter’s,” Hu told Beijing News. “But he looks more like his father.”

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