Fertility Inc.: One Dad, One Hundred Babies

0:05It was 2023, and inside an L.A. family court, clerks were working through some documents. They're what's known as parentage petitions.

0:17If you've enlisted a surrogate to carry your baby, then you need a judge to approve your parentage petition in order to actually take the baby home. It's basically the court saying, yes, this kid is legally yours. Once this child is born, you, the parents, have the parental rights to the child. You are clear to put your name on the birth certificate. That's investigative reporter Catherine Long. And are these usually contentious petitions? No. Typically these are, you know, I hesitate to say rubber-stamped, but it's a fairly simple process. But this time, the clerks noticed something. One name kept showing up.

1:00over and over again. A man named Shu Bo had put his name on at least four applications for parental rights for children who were as yet unborn but were being carried by surrogates. The same guy, Shu Bo, was applying for parental rights to at least four babies being carried by surrogates. The clerks thought that was a little strange. It's not terribly common to have that many simultaneous surrogacies. They started poking around and they realized that in addition to those at least four children, Shubo already had or was in the process of having eight other children. That's 12 kids total. Twelve kids, all born via surrogacy, all with the same father.

1:59This sounds crazy. It was certainly unusual. When Catherine and her colleagues started digging into the surrogacy industry, they got curious about one particular corner of that business, the corner that serves wealthy Chinese parents. When we started speaking with people who work in this corner of the surrogacy industry that caters to Chinese parents, Something that we kept hearing was concerns about a small number of Chinese parents who seemed to want to have extremely large numbers of children. Think 10 children, 20 children, even, I kid you not, 100 children.

2:45When I first heard about this, I thought this had to be an exaggeration. This had to be made up. but then we started looking into it and it turned out to be true.

3:04Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, March 20th.

3:21Coming up, another story from our investigation into the fertility industry. Today, one dad, 100 babies.

3:45In many countries around the world, surrogacy is illegal. So international parents looking to have a baby this way often head to the U.S. These days, about 40 % of U.S. surrogacies are for parents from abroad. And about 40 % of those parents come from just one country, China. You've got to understand the Chinese policy. Single women cannot get fertility treatment in China. You cannot do sex selection in China. And gays are not legally recognized in China. That's Nathan Zhang. He runs a business that helps Chinese parents access the U.S. fertility industry, which many consider to be the best in the world.

4:26For the IVF, fertility clinical side, U.S. is like the NBA in the basketball field. Those are the best players, physicians, lab technicians, biologists.

4:41Nathan's business is basically a concierge service. He hooks Chinese customers up with IVF clinics, egg donors, sperm banks, surrogacy agencies, and lawyers. When he got into the industry about 15 years ago, Nathan says he catered to a pretty niche demographic, rich Chinese business people who'd tried having kids the traditional way and failed. But more recently, he told me, his customer base has expanded. He sees more gay couples now, more single women, and more wealthy clients looking to build big families. So our colleagues have been reporting on this trend of Chinese customers, often who are very rich, who want lots of babies.

5:28Have you seen that in your business? Yeah, we saw a lot. It's just actually traditional Chinese. We usually have bigger families. and my grandparents have seven siblings on my father's side and my grandfather and my grandmother has like six siblings. But that's the Chinese traditional culture. Nathan says that while traditional Chinese culture might be a motivation for some of his clients, he suspects that some of his wealthiest customers are taking their cues from someone else, the wealthiest man in the world. If people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.

6:10That's Elon Musk at a Wall Street Journal event a few years ago. Is this why you have so many children? I'm trying to set a good example. Yeah. You know, gotta practice what I preach. Elon Musk is a great, is a model for the Chinese, especially for Chinese entrepreneurs. Elon Musk has 14 kids. I think it's a dramatic inspiration for Chinese businessmen.

6:41Nathan told me about this one time when a single Chinese businessman reached out to him. I do met a potential client. They wanted 200 kids. You had a client who said they wanted 200 kids? Yeah. How did you react when they requested that? I was happy at the beginning because it's a business. Think about, you know, it's a business. But if you come down and say, hey, first question I ask is, that's a single guy. Who's going to take care of the kid? And he said, my sister. And I said, oh.

7:25Nathan didn't take the man as a client. And after that, he says he instituted a new policy. We only have families to have three kids, no more than three kids, and no more than two at the same time. Why is that your policy? I just feel it's a lot of work. I have a two kids, and I got a lot of joy by spending time with them. I understand the joy for the family, but you got to be responsible.

8:00What Nathan experienced with that potential client isn't an isolated case. When my colleague Catherine Long started calling people in the industry, she heard a few different stories like this. One attorney said his client was a billionaire Chinese parent with 20 children. Another surrogacy agency owner said that he had helped fill an order for over 100 children born through surrogacy. A single person had 100 children through surrogacy? At least they seem to be trying to, yeah. How is this possible? It's possible because there's a network of companies that are designed to cater to the whims of the very rich that are operating in a space nearly wholly devoid of regulation.

8:42Despite the fact that surrogacy is a multi-billion dollar industry, there are no federal laws regulating it. And that's created a thriving cottage industry catering to almost any desire a wealthy parent could have. It means that nowadays, if you've got the money and you want a bunch of babies born all at once, you can get that in the U.S. And you don't even have to be here to do it. Here's how it works.

9:12It all starts, of course, with sperm and an egg. That could be collected in an IVF clinic in, say, Hong Kong or Japan. That would be shipped over to an IVF clinic in the United States. An embryo might be created and then transferred into a surrogate in California. Nine months later, that surrogate gives birth, at which point another business steps in. We've spoken with a few surrogates who've said that the children they carried and gave birth to were ultimately picked up at the hospital not by the parents, but by nannies or people carrying power of attorney documentation.

9:55Those credentialed baby couriers might then deliver the infant to a house. Inside that house could be other surrogate babies, all being cared for by nannies. They may take care of them for a couple of months. And once the child's travel documents are ready, the nanny will help bring the child back to China and reunite it with his parents. And thanks to the 14th Amendment, that baby would also be a U.S. citizen.

10:28How much can this whole process cost? This can easily cost well over$150 ,000. We're looking at$200 ,000 is pretty typical. And if people want to do this, there isn't much standing in their way. Other than, perhaps, a few sharp-eyed clerks at an L.A. courthouse. Up next, the strange case of Shoe Bo.

11:08Shubo.

11:20Clerks at that LA family court knew a few things about Shubo, the guy whose name kept appearing on those parentage petitions, He was applying for parental rights to at least four babies, babies who would soon be born via surrogacy. The clerks also knew that Shubo already had, or was in the process of having, eight more kids via surrogate. That number of children raised a red flag for family court judge Amy Pellman, so the judge called for a hearing.

11:53Shubo, it turns out, is a tech entrepreneur who lives in China. So he joined the hearing remotely. And the judge starts asking questions, and Shubo starts answering them. And he says that ultimately he hopes to have as many as 20 children. He says he wants to have all boys because they're superior to girls. He says that he hopes his children will grow up to inherit his business empire. And he's saying all this to a female judge. Yes, that's right. How did she take that? Well, according to people who were in the hearing, she seemed less than impressed by some of these answers. At one point, the judge asked about the children that he'd already had through surrogates, and he said that he hadn't actually visited them yet because his work had been too busy.

12:54Were you able to reach out to Shubo? Did you talk to him? We made numerous attempts to reach him through his company, and a representative for his company did end up responding, although they did not give their name. They disputed many of the facts in our reporting. They also promised to unleash a campaign of retribution against one of my colleagues on social media. After Catherine and her colleagues published their story about Shubo, his company put out a statement on social media. They called the Wall Street Journal a rumor monger and disputed that he'd said boys are superior to girls. Well, so what were you able to find out about this guy, Shubo?

13:35Shubo is a video game entrepreneur. His company, Duoyi Network, makes fantasy multiplayer games. In China, he's a bit of a recluse. He rarely gives interviews. He hasn't been photographed in public for years. and he's known as kind of an online mega-poster. Shubo posts under his own name, but Catherine was able to link other social media accounts to him based on things those accounts posted, stuff like personal documents and details of legal proceedings, things only Shubo or someone very close to him would know. In their statement, Shubo's company denied that those other accounts were his. The tone of a lot of his posts is pretty inflammatory and oftentimes very misogynistic.

14:27To use an example from the Weibo account of his company, they put out a statement saying that they would welcome applications from people whose careers have been harmed by their rejection of feminism. Wow. So what do we know about what his goal is with having all these kids? Well, accounts linked to him have posted pretty prolifically about his goal of having a large number of children. At one point, an account linked to him said that Shubo wanted to have 50 high-quality sons. At another point, accounts linked to him have praised Elon Musk's large family and expressed a desire to have children with Elon Musk.

15:10Although the account said, well, since I can't do that, we're both men, I guess I'll just have to settle for having grandchildren with him. I guess implying that their children would, you know, at some point get together.

15:26After that hearing in L.A., Judge Pellman denied Shubo's parentage petitions. The court declined to comment on the case.

15:38But then what happens to the kids? It kind of threw the legal fate of these children into limbo to a certain degree. Without an order of parentage, it's not entirely clear who is in charge of the children once they're born. And typically in that case, according to experts in the space that we spoke to, the children might end up in the custody of social services or possibly at a certain point in foster care.

16:13This is extraordinary. So there are four children, there are four pregnancies. Now at this point, we don't know what's going to happen to the kids? Yeah, that's right. I mean, it was truly, this is not something that happens nearly ever in surrogacy proceedings.

16:38Do you have any sense of what was going through the minds of the surrogates? We weren't able to reach any of the surrogates. I can only guess how alarmed they might have been if they were aware of this reversal. Even though Catherine wasn't able to speak with Shubo's surrogates, she's spoken to others in similar situations. Surrogates who've discovered that they were carrying just one of many babies for the same parent. And that revelation oftentimes was very disconcerting for them. They want to believe that the child they're carrying is going to receive the full love and attention from these parents.

17:16And to learn at some point in the process that that's not the case, that, you know, the child that they're carrying is going to be one of many, comes as a real shock for a lot of surrogates. It seems like Shubo didn't, like, get any real pushback for this plan of his until he just reached this L.A. family court and this one judge. Yeah. And, in fact, some legal experts might argue that the judge went out on a limb in denying his parentage petition since he had broken no law. There, you know, there is no law preventing anybody from having as many children as they would like. In the absence of regulation, fertility industry groups have recommended that businesses not work with parents who are seeking more than two simultaneous surrogacies.

18:00But that's just a recommendation. They aren't necessarily bound to adhere to these guidelines, and certainly they don't take the force of law. An account linked to Shubo posted that he was ultimately able to get those four babies, or at least a few of them. According to surrogacy lawyers Catherine spoke with, Shubo could have simply refiled his parentage petitions in another jurisdiction. So how is Shu faring in this quest of his to have a mega family? He seems to be doing pretty successfully. On social media, accounts linked to Shu Bo have posted multiple videos of children. One of the videos that he posted shows the person behind the camera walking out onto what appears to be a patio.

18:55The patio is filled with children, more than 20 children. And as the children realize that the person behind the camera has walked onto the scene, they start running up to him one by one, and increasingly in groups, and they start saying, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.

19:17And one of them is carrying a little duck-stuffed animal, and they say, Look at my duck. The little girl, in a floppy pink sun hat, holds her duck up to the camera. Baba, she says, Dad, a little duck wants to hug you. A little boy adds, I want to hug you.

19:44The children appear to be very healthy. They're in the care of women who might be nannies. In another video, the children do puzzles and recite Chinese verses for the camera. Oftentimes the children are pictured eating meals and playing in play areas or in what appear to be bedrooms.

20:18for so many people the fertility industry has made the impossible possible it's brought hope to people who might never have been able to have children of their own but in the absence of meaningful rules the industry has also become a playground for the rich I think that what we know about extremely wealthy people is that they feel that their desires can be actualized with only a little money. And if your desire is to have a large number of children who are related to you, it's possible to make that happen with the technology we have today. And part of the technology is surrogacy.

21:13There's one more video that Catherine showed me. It was posted by an ex-girlfriend of Shu Bo's. It's pretty crudely cut together, but it shows a parade of little boys. They're in their PJs. One by one, they step up to the camera and say, I am Shu.

21:43We don't know exactly how many kids Shubo has now. That ex-girlfriend said he has over 300. But after she made that claim on social media, Shubo's company stepped in to clarify. They said, no, no, that's actually not true. We've reviewed the records, and he has only a little over 100.

22:16Next Friday, we've got one more story from the fringes of the fertility industry. This time, we look at the tech billionaires trying to genetically engineer babies. The conversation, to be clear, was, should we edit an embryo or can we edit an embryo? you know what it was actually neither of those it was we are going to edit an embryo

22:54that's all for today Friday March 20th the journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal additional reporting in this episode by Ben Foldy and Ling Ling Wei special thanks to Lisa Wang The show is made by Catherine Brewer, Pia Gadkari, Isabella Jepal, Sophie Codner, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singhi, Jivika Verma, Lisa Wang, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamis, and me, Ryan Knudson. It's Lisa Wang's last week with us. Lisa, we are so grateful to have gotten to work with you over these past three years.