A homosexual couple rented a woman in a rural Chinese village for $125,000 to serve at a surrogate — but plan to demand a refund if she gives does not give birth to a baby boy.
According to The Christian Institute, the two men “used genetic testing to prioritise the implantation of male embryos.” Surrogacy is banned in China, and surrogacy payments are illegal in the UK except for costs deemed to be “reasonable expenses.”
On June 17, Mr. Justice MacDonald of the Family Division of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales granted the men a parental order in June; the written judgment, handed down on September 29, states that the parental order is in the now-20-month-old child’s “best interests.” The justice did emphasize that the men, referred to as “C” and “D,” should not view his ruling as “a licence to engage in unlawful commercial surrogacy arrangements abroad.”
The sex-selection clause in the surrogacy agreement, however, is more common than many realize. In 2022, a homosexual couple from Pasadena, California, sued the HRC Fertility clinic after their hired surrogate gave birth to a baby girl. They had ordered a boy, and they felt themselves to be wronged customers who received the wrong product. As one LGBT outlet reported it:
The Sanigers said that they decided on their kids’ names and even got Gmail addresses for them before they were married in 2013. They wanted two boys, and now they say that they will have to pay a lot to have their two boys because of HRC and Kolb “negligently, recklessly, and/or intentionally transferred a female embryo to the Sanigers’ gestational carrier.” It is not clear why the couple specifically wanted two boys.
LifeSite report: The same year, a New York lesbian couple sued the CNY fertility clinic in Latham after they discovered that their baby was a boy. “We didn’t want to have a boy because of the assaults and because of the socialization of boys — there’s constant socialization of what it means to be a ‘real man,’” the furious mother explained. “People say, ‘Oh, he’s a boy, let him hit you,’ and all the camouflage and guns don’t help. It reinforces masculinity, and that’s a reminder of the assaults every time.”
Customers purchasing children have also turned to litigation if they believe the “product” to be “defective.” A same-sex couple in Canada sued the surrogate mother who bore their son in Ontario Superior Court earlier this year, “two years after she refused their request to abort the fetus because of a cleft lip and possible genetic abnormalities.” The couple backed off on their request for a late-term abortion, but claim that the mother did not keep them informed of the baby’s health and, in grotesquely ironic twist, that she put the baby at risk.
“You know I’m a single mom, you know I have a daughter, and you’re basically suing me for my house. It seems very s—ty, it’s just awful,” the surrogate said. “I just feel used … They didn’t get the perfect child they wanted and they threw me away.”
In 2014, an Australian couple who hired a surrogate in Thailand were furious when she gave birth to twins — because the boy had Down syndrome. They took the girl to Australia and left her twin brother behind.
In 2019, an ABC News investigation uncovered the story of American parents who abandoned their daughter Bridget, born to a surrogate in Ukraine, after she was born prematurely with medical complications and disabilities. She remained in a children’s institution in Ukraine; the couple hired another surrogate and procured twin boys.
“It is difficult to think of anything more regressive than turning the creation of a child into a transaction in which the child’s sex can determine whether money is refunded or not,” Lexi Ellingworth of Stop Surrogacy Now told the Telegraph in response to Mr. Justice MacDonald’s ruling.
“Yet these are precisely the kinds of practices that people can access abroad despite being prohibited here.” The European Union formally recognized surrogacy as a form of human trafficking in 2024.