The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Monday, December 15, 2025

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.Part I (00:14 – 07:43)The Brave New World of IVF and Surrogacy: This Chinese Billionaire Has Over 100 Children in the U.S. Through IVF and Surrogacy to Build His Own DynastyThe Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of U.S.-Born Babies Via Surrogate by The Wall Street Journal (Katherine Long, Ben Foldy, Lingling Wei)Part II (07:43 – 20:28)The Commodification of Pregnancy and Babies: Surrogacy is Big Business, and It is Morally WrongPart III (20:28 – 23:12)One Child Only Revenge: And Billionaires Purchasing Babies is a Reaction to Historic Crackdowns on Families by ChinaPart IV (23:12 – 26:38)The Brave New World of Billionaires: There Have Never Been More Billionaires in the World Than Right NowThe World Has More Billionaires Than Ever by The Wall Street Journal (Juliet Chung)Sign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

It's Monday, December 15, 2025. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. The entire field of science fiction, as it emerged particularly in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, was an attempt to try to create futuristic narratives, and usually they were put in the future because they were rather unimaginable in the present. And so much of the science fiction that emerged very famously from authors like, Isaac Asimov and others. They were really set in the future close enough that it was imaginable that we could see ourselves there, but far enough that all kinds of futuristic plot lines, developments, technologies,

robots, for example, aliens, for example, those could be incorporated. Sometimes it's kind of difficult to tell the difference between fact and fiction when it comes to some of the accounts that we see coming at us in the media. That's why it's particularly important to know that what we're about to talk about is factual. It is reported in the Wall Street Journal. It is fact-checked. It is subject to all the standards of the Wall Street Journal. Thus, I'm going to tell you that you should brace yourself for this headline, quote, the Chinese billionaires having dozens of U.S.-born babies via surrogate. So the headline tells us that there are Chinese billionaires having, the number here is dozens

of U.S.-born babies through the technology of surrogate parenting. And so let's just look at that. talk about IVF, we're going to talk about the embryos, we're going to talk about surrogate motherhood here. But it's the subhead in this news story that I want you to just brace yourself to hear. Here it is, quote, video game executive Shubo said to have more than 100 children and other elites build mega families testing citizenship laws and drawing on nannies, IVF, and legal firms set out to help them. So this report comes to us by the worker reporters, Catherine Long. bin Foldy and Ling Ling Wei. And it goes to Los Angeles, first of all, listen to this.

Quote, inside a closed Los Angeles courtroom, something wasn't right. Clerks working for family judge Amy Pelman were reviewing routine surrogacy petitions when they spotted an unusual pattern. The same name again and again. Next line. A Chinese billionaire was seeking parental rights to at least four unborn children, and the court's additional research showed he had already fathered or was in the process of fathering at least eight more. all through surrogates. Okay, so just full stop for a moment. Let's just take account of where we are.

We have one man, a Chinese billionaire, seeking parental rights when surrogates are carrying what was originally four unborn children and then eight more. So that's a total of 12 unborn children, one father and all this number of surrogate mothers. And through agencies here in the United States, the judge put a stop to this

and called the man. in for a confidential hearing. This is all the way back in the summer of 2003. So this is now more than two years ago. Quote, he never entered the courtroom, according to people, attended the hearing. The maker of fantasy video games lived in China and

appeared via video, speaking through an interpreter. He said he hoped to have 20 or so U.S. born children through surrogacy. Boys, because they're superior to girls, he said. They are intended one day to take over his business. Okay. So,

The Chinese billionaire hires surrogates in the United States. He is not even here. He is called into court here. He does not show up. He appears by video. He tells the judge that it is his intention to have, quote, 20 or so U.S. born children. That means his intention is that they be considered U.S. citizens. So he wants 20 children.

No, he wants 20 boys. He wants 20 surrogate sons. And he wants all of them to have U.S. citizenship. He's a billionaire and he's paying. for it. We're then told that several of his kids, which were already born, are being raised by nannies in the nearby town of Irvine as they awaited paperwork to travel to China. The billionaire said that he hadn't met them yet because he had been busy at work. Okay, so just consider this. A man's too busy at work, managing his billions of dollars, his vast enterprises. So he is using his own sperm

cells, presumably, at least according to this article, to be joined to purchased eggs that will be combined in an embryo that will be implanted in a surrogate mother who will be hired to carry the baby to term and then we'll have no parental rights. The parental rights being signed over to the Chinese billionaire who is in China. Now, before we go any further, let's just consider how many things are in play here. First of all, you have the biotechnology revolution. You have the ethics of these assisted reproductive technologies. You have the man who's basically buying babies. Let's just put it bluntly. He's buying babies. He's buying the medical services. He's buying the human cells. He is buying the embryos. He is buying the surrogacy relationships in order just to have

these babies. But they're not just babies. They're boys. And so what is behind that is almost assuredly embryo selection of one sort or another. The embryos are being sorted. He only wants boys. Now, there's another donor here who wants girls because he wants to raise basically a small army of girls who will become women who will marry very important men. He wants. He wants that kind of a dynasty of sorts. The point is, none of this should be taking place. The Christian worldview reminds us that all of this is supposed to be a unity within the context of marriage. None of this is intended to go this way.

And even as you have President Trump giving all kinds of affirmation of in vitro fertilization, and even though you have many Christians who have endorsed the process, the reality is that it has opened up what can only be described as a Pandora's Box. And that Pandora's box means that, as you will find out in the report here from the Wall Street Journal, you have single men going to agencies that serve single men with the creation of the embryos and then the hiring of the surrogates. And some of the controversies are about some of these agencies that have failed to deliver on their promises. But it also becomes very clear that this is a completely unregulated Wild Wild West. So that's been referred to that way before.

the assisted reproductive technology business, the surrogacy enterprise, the IVF industry. It is basically unregulated and it is out of control. And you notice the profit motive here. Why would a company cooperate with a Chinese billionaire to create a super army of boys by IVF and surrogacy? It can only be because they're being paid for it. And you will come across some who will say that women, for instance, they have entered the surrogacy structure because they want to help people have. babies, yeah, but they're also in general terms being paid for it, and in some cases, they're being paid quite a lot. Not only that, there are agencies that make a lot of money, because as this

article makes clear, some of them are charging tens of thousands of dollars of administrative fees on top of the monies that go to the surrogate mothers themselves. So this was discovered. It was discovered by the people who were filing these papers reported to the judge. The judge held a hearing. We're told that the judge was alarmed, quote, surrogacy was a tool to help. people build families, but what Xu was describing, that is the Chinese billionaire, didn't seem like parenting. Well, let's just state that should be obvious. This doesn't sound like parenting because let's just state the truth. This isn't parenting. This is a commercial enterprise. It is a financial transaction. It is basically big business. And you'll notice something else. There's a lot of money

to be made here. It's made at multiple levels. But let's just get down to the bottom line. This is a technology that now allows for the development of custom babies as a consumer product. And I know there are a lot of people who would say that they have used IVF. They're Christian couples who would say they used IVF, and clearly they're thankful for their children and they love their children. But most of them have never acknowledged all that is in the background of the IVF technology, which means that that also includes in the main as the central model of IVF, and it's almost exclusive now,

the creation of more embryos than are ever likely to be implanted. And furthermore, even when couples don't want to know this, there is, in many cases, some sorting that takes place with someone looking, and sometimes they'll simply say we think this embryo is more likely to be successfully implanted in the womb and thus to go to full term than another.

But that still is a form of embryo sorting. And now you'll notice the consumer product that reaches this kind of just almost impossibly unimaginably inflated concept when you get to this man. And by the way, remember the subhead in the article? This man hopes for 20 boys, this Chinese billionaire. But remember, in the subhead to the article, I said that one is now said to have more than 100 children.

Okay. Well, it turns out that this is the same one. It turns out that what was 20 is now more than 100. So you think about something like George Orwell's 1984, or more to the point, you think about Aldous Huxley's brave new world, or you think for that matter of Plato's utopia, going back to ancient Greece, you have the idea that there will be basically children making factories. Now, something that a lot of people will think about is that Plato did not want children to be raised by parents. He also was very much for a form of eugenics, good genes. He wanted healthy children, bright children, he wanted them from the right stock, and he wanted them raised basically on something like a factory farm setting. And this has been something that's come up again and again and again.

But it has been in the form of some kind of utopian fantasy or science fiction. This isn't science fiction. This is the Wall Street Journal. This is a hard news report about one Chinese billionaire, now believed to be the father of more than 100 children by IVF and surrogacy in this one situation. we're looking at multiple children with multiple surrogate mothers, all of them boys. It is his own little master race. And guess what? Someone's making a lot of money?

And guess what? At least a lot of it is there in Los Angeles. The Wall Street Journal does a good job in explaining the details in this case and also making very clear that this is an unregulated business. By and large, very unregulated. That should be very clear. And we're also looking at a high-tech angle here because there are people such as Elon Musk, who is known to be the father of 14 known children. Do you like the way that's put?

And we're told that they have paid millions in surrogacy fees to hire women in the U.S. to help them build families. Some Chinese clients have hired firms to help them build families described here as of jaw-dropping size. Shu, the Chinese billionaire, calls himself, quote, China's first father. And he's known in China, by the way, as a vocal critic of feminism. Well, there's something going on here. He wants all boys because he says they are smarter than girls. And on social media, according to the Wall Street Journal, his company said he has more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the United States. So this is his own company disclosing this. And by the way, you'll recall that one of the things he said is that he wants to raise some of these boys to reach

the leadership of his business. And so he's building a dynasty by surrogacy, the commodification of children, his own designer children. And by the way, all boys. Another wealthy Chinese executive, we are told, hired U.S. models. That means fashion models. The way this article is written, given this kind of science fiction turned fact, you see U.S. models. You wonder if that means like car models. No, this means not models of children, but rather he hired fashion models in the United States as egg donors to have 10 girls. And this is, again, as I said, with the aim, with one day marrying them off or told to powerful men.

All right. Now, when you look at the money to be made here, we're told that the quote, thriving many industry of American surrogacy agencies, law firms, clinics, delivery agencies, and nanny services. By the way, the nanny services are even picking up the newborns from hospitals. You talk about a consumer product, a baby reduced to an inhuman consumer product. You know, you have sperm cells from China with eggs here in the United States, fashion models. You have a surrogate mother who is being paid here. You have American medical services. And of course, these babies are born as American citizens, according to the claims made here. They're born in the United States, and they're not even handed over to the one who will be listed as parent. They're handed over to a nanny from the hospital to be put into extended care. This is just like Plato's factory for babies. That's exactly what it turns up to be. And again, the money, up to $200,000 per child. Okay, so let's do a little math here. $200,000 per child, that's $2 million for 10 or $20 million for 100. That's a lot of money.

And I'm just going to point to the fact there's a lot of opportunity there. There is a lot of incentive there for companies and others to get into this big time. And to defy any rules being put on it, basically to say, babies are now a consumer product. Let's just say it out loud and they are an expensive consumer product. you order your baby, you send yourselves, we'll have a nanny pick up the baby who'll be an American citizen, and one day you can have that child for whatever purpose you want them, building your own dynasty or marrying off to some powerful man. That's exactly what we find in this article.

Now, you'll recall that there's been controversy over President Trump and his administration pressing back on the idea of birthright citizenship. And, you know, if he needed any ammunition, here it is. And it is the fact that you have these babies that are being. being born to surrogates on behalf of a Chinese client who simply wants to buy American baby boys, complete with citizenship. That is a perversion of the very notion of citizenship, and frankly, it's a huge problem that indeed does need to be addressed, by Congress, by constitutional amendment, if necessary, and certainly by the courts in terms of sanity. No one can claim that this was

what was intended under the 14th Amendment in terms of the statements about citizens. No one can say that this is what those who adopted that language had in mind, even in their wildest nightmares. It's interesting to see that you have a Chinese authority say, quote, Elon Musk is becoming a role model now. We're then told an increasing number of crazy rich quotation marks around the words crazy and rich clients are commissioning dozens or even hundreds of U.S. born babies with the goal of, quote, forging an unstoppable family dynasty. Okay, we're not talking about Bonanza here. I realize that's pretty dated now. We're not talking about a little dynasty as in a big ranch.

We're talking about a major dynasty as in over 100 sons. Just imagine. Let's go back to an ancient Roman emperor and talk about 100 sons. By the way, given the Roman pattern, they would likely kill each other off. Or if you were to go to the Ottoman Empire, the surviving one might strangle the other ones. the history. I'm telling you the truth. This should set off moral alarm bells everywhere. So certainly set off the moral conscience. But we as Christians have to look at it at an even deeper level because we have to remember that what we are given in creation is an order and a

context. The context for having children is the same context for having sexual relations. And that is within the covenant of marriage, the union of a man and a woman and a monogamous union. That is what is set. Right there. Genesis 1, Genesis 2. And in that context, having children is absolutely right and absolutely good. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. It's not only a good thing. It is a divine command. That is God's purpose.

That is the design of creation order for our good and for God's glory. But one of the Christian principles, a very important theological and ethical principle, is that if you begin to take apart the context, you take away the good of what God gave us in creation order. If you change the context, you are changing the thing itself. That means rejecting, remodeling, redefining the goods that God gave us in creation, and instead saying, we want them on our terms. We want them shaped like we want them shaped. We want them to be what we want them to be.

And this is a denial of creation order. And by the way, by definition, if obedience to creation order and consistency with creation order means human flourishing in God's glory. then tampering with denying subverting creation order means robbing God of his glory and it means turning something that was given to us as a good into something that is much less good at its best and perhaps absolutely bad, evil and wrong at its worst.

There are so many people involved in this. For instance, let me just read to you this one line. A Los Angeles surrogacy attorney said he has helped his client, a Chinese billionaire, have 20 children through surrogacy, in recent years." That's a scandal. How in the world can that meet the standards of legal ethics? But once again, you see here that everything begins to fall apart.

Once this turns into the process of commodifying human beings, if it just becomes a baby business, then pretty soon you have Chinese billionaires ordering 100 boys. By the way, let's just look at this from the child's perspective for just a moment. We're talking about the child knowing that he is a product, a consumer good. And remember we're being told that this is all by contract, and this Chinese billionaire is still in China. And the babies, once born from the surrogate, the baby will not know, are now being picked up by nannies, taking them basically to vast nurseries where they're going to be cared for, presumably, in order one day to be taken to China to meet their father. But just imagine that dinner table, if there ever is one.

100 boys and dad. What a cozy picture. Now, you say, well, self-regulation may work. Well, listen to this. Quote, industry groups recommend that agencies and IVF clinics not work with parents seeking more than two simultaneous surrogacies because of the logistical and emotional challenges and the risk that it will increase the perception that surrogacy commodifies pregnancy. Increase the perception? You know, they're worried about PR. This is turning into a commodity.

That's exactly what they're doing. They're commodifying having human babies. And notice that the self-regulatory. means that industry groups, whatever those are, recommend that to agencies and clinics not work the parents thinking more than two simultaneous surrogacies. That tells you a whole lot right there. All right. We're also told that the agencies themselves, this is more than I expected, typically receive $40,000 to $50,000 per surrogacy that is on top of payments made to the surrogate carriers. Notice the word mother just drops out. Another big tell. In moral and theological,

terms, the fact that even the word mother just disappears entirely, they are only surrogate carriers. If you want evidence of the deeply, deeply suspect, deeply wrong dimensions of this entire thing, notice that there is no father, unless he shows up, I guess, is the consumer making the purchase. And the mother disappears altogether, forever. just a surrogate carrier. Thank you very much. Oh, and one other very interesting thing here. Why is all this taking place in the United States? Well, is it because of advanced reproductive technologies? Yes. Is it because of the medical institutions and services, the legal context? Yes. But you want to know the other reason? It's because this would be illegal in China.

So once again, you see how things work in this global market for children. What's illegal in China, a Chinese billionaire can just buy in the United States. This, by the way, may have in retrospect something to do with the toppling by scandal of a Chinese foreign minister. Now, we don't know all the details, but it appears that there could very well be something like this, certainly not on the biggest scale, that has involved senior figures in the Chinese government. This would have to come, you would think, as an embarrassment to the Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping. Then again, given the worldview there, it's not wrong. for the same reasons, I believe it should be wrong.

It's not illegal there for the same reasons. In Christian terms, I believe it should be illegal. Part of the problem there is the background in terms of laws and traditions about heredity. That's not irrelevant. That's certainly not, I think, the main Christian concern. Oh, one other fascinating thing in all of this. We've often talked about the repressive policy,

horrifying, indeed, the murderous policy, the one-child-only policy put in place by China, the communist authorities, trying to stop what they thought was out of control population growth. And of course, what happened is they ended up with a deficit of babies. They now have a falling birth rate. They have an aging population. They have two few babies rather than too many. But they also have the problem of the so-called broken branches. It is because of the historical background there, the preference for boys, was so overwhelming that there are now millions of Chinese men who should be husbands

and fathers who will never be married because there aren't enough women. And some of these men are very angry about that. And their revenge is what's referred to here as, quote, one-child policy revenge. And you've got men who, by the way, probably will never have a wife who are deciding that's not going to keep them from having babies through surrogacy in the United States with enough money. All right, we'll be watching this. It's just such a big story. It deserves the attention that we've given it today and more.

And there will be unfolding ramifications from this. I want to remind you that months ago on the briefing, I discussed the fact that multiple babies were found in one home, one private residence in the Los Angeles area, and the concentration of babies and the confused status of those babies led to an investigation. You have to wonder, maybe this was something like that. Time will tell.

When this kind of story breaks, a lot of people begin to connect dots, and somebody's going to recognize this basically describes the operation down the street. All right, before we close today, let's talk about billionaires for a moment. We've been talking about Chinese billionaires buying babies. But the same newspaper, the Wall Street Journal last weekend, came out with an article entitled, The World Has More Billionaires than ever. So let's just think about it for a moment. Chinese billionaires. How many billionaires are there in the world where there aren't a billion of them? but we are told that there are now something like 2,900 billionaires.

That's a lot of money. That's a lot of billionaires. 2,900, almost 3,000. We're told that they alone now control $15.8 trillion. That's up from a year earlier when there were 2,700 billionaires, the cumulative wealth of about $14 trillion. So we've gone from 2,700 billionaires to $2,900 billionaires. their control from $14 trillion to $15.8 trillion.

We're told that, quote, the number in wealth, billionaires as a whole, were boosted by the second highest number of new billionaires minted in a year. How's that irony? We got it. Okay. That's 287 since the UBS, the Big Swiss banking giant, began tracking that figure. All right, so that's a lot. John Matthews, who is a head of private wealth management for UBS in the United States, said, quote, you've seen this acceleration of billionaire growth.

Okay, that's the kind of sentence. I just have to stop and say, does that mean billionaires growing or a growing number of billionaires? You know which one it means. But this is where an editor should have said, you could say that more clearly. So there are more billionaires, not bigger billionaires, but we're being told that it also comes from all areas.

Comes through entrepreneurship, that is of financial creativity and also inheritance. Also, rising investment gains over the last 12 months. 91 of the new billionaires inherited their wealth, including 15 members of just two families involved in the pharmaceutical industry in Germany. All right, so this is just something to watch. Billionaire was an unimaginable noun, just a matter of some decades ago. And now it's so real, there are 2,900 of them to be specific, according to UBS. And they are controlling trillions upon trillions of dollars.

So let me just point out the obvious here, and that is that if you get these billionaires together, and some of them individually, they have wealth bigger than the GDP of several countries and in some cases bigger than several countries added together. All right. So I'm going to stop here and say, of course, there are ethical considerations. How in the world did they get this money, you know, et cetera? But the big thing, I think, in ethical terms, is for us to understand that that kind of wealth means that you can buy evidently just about anything. And that's what takes us back to the first issue of our concern today. That means that billionaires are now able to buy lots of babies. Welcome to the brave new world, and especially evidently to the brave new world of billionaires.

Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website at Albertmuller.com. You can follow me on Twitter or X by going to X.com forward slash Albert Moller. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbtsbts. For information on Boyce College, just go to Boisecollege.com. I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.