Today, Explained - The dark side of surrogacy

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

The case of a California couple who had more than 20 kids via surrogacy before being charged with child abuse illustrates how a lack of regulation can lead to chaos. This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. A group of babies sitting on the floor. Photo by Tom Merton via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast⁠.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kayla is a mom of four from Corpus Christi. A few years back, Kayla found a gig that would let her support her kids and also let someone else experience the joys of parenthood. Surrogacy. She signed up with an agency and became a surrogate. She was going to be carrying a child for a couple in California whom she'd never met, but the agency sent her a profile. It's kind of like dating in that world. They're like smiling and the man seems to be a bit older. He's in his 60s. The woman is in her 30s. and they express that they really want to be like a lifelong friend of whoever carries a child for them.

That was not what happened. As the baby grew inside her, Kayla started to realize something was wrong with this arrangement. Eventually, she'd be plunged into a nightmare scenario with a terrifying question at its root. What did this couple want? And why had they asked her to carry a child for them? Coming up on today, explained from Fox in the U.S.,

surrogacy is opaque and unregulated. Kayla's story illustrates the peril for surrogate. surrogates and for babies. I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Nathan Lane. We talk about his critically acclaimed run in Death of a Salesman, taking his dog to therapy, and winning an Emmy for only murders in the building.

New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers. Megan Rapino here. This week on Why Are You Like This? I am talking with shrinkings and ugly betties, Michael Yuri. We dig into his Plano, Texas upbringing and how Vanessa Williams had a huge impact on his career. I'm also weighing in on the Indiana fever GM Amber Cox's comments on their fan base.

Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This, wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. This is Today Explained. Ava Kaufman is a staff writer at The New Yorker's Shoeuvre. She wrote about Kayla. Eva, when did Kayla start questioning the surrogacy arrangement? She starts to have questions just about whether or not things are normal. And she's really good about actually asking them and raising them to the agency. And so her first question is, hey, I have parents. Am I supposed to be hearing from them?

The second time she gets really anxious is when the transfer's already happened. And now she's really carrying their kid. It's growing. She's sending them pictures of the ultrasound. And still, it's mainly crickets. Kayla is eventually on a car ride, and she's 17 weeks pregnant at this point. And she scrolling on her phone, she's in these surrogacy Facebook groups, and sees someone else who's also caring for the same agency, which agencies have a lot of clients.

And then she sees that I think it's either the initials or even the full name of the same intended parents. So there's more than one woman carrying a child for these two people. Maybe at the same time. Huh. She messages this other woman and she says, Hey, I just want to understand, like, are these people the same people? And the answer she gets is, yes, we're both caring for them.

I had no idea either. And I've heard that they are. have some other kids. She was shocked. She was completely confused and she was somewhat panicked, but she also wanted to give these parents the benefit of the doubt because it's not super usual for a couple to have simultaneous surrogates, but some couples actually do. It's, you know, not talked about much, but in case one of the babies doesn't work out, if they have a lot of money, maybe they want two kids of the same age. So really strange. But maybe not shady.

To Kayla's credit, she reaches out to her own fertility lawyer who she used to negotiate the contract. And when she reaches out to the agency that matched her with this couple, they say, no, no, no, no, no. And the direct quote is they say, they definitely don't have a million kids, LOL. LOL is a direct quote. LOL is in the direct quote. And at that point, you know, the pregnancy needs to continue. She's still getting paid. and everyone who knows more about this than she does says, you know, just keep calm and carry on.

And that's all she knows at that point. And she does carry on. She has the baby. She hands the baby over. What happens next? So she hands the baby over. She's so relieved to see the mom at the hospital. Intended mother, she's known, has shown up late, but she does take the baby home.

And they start to communicate a bit. And the intended mother, after just a few weeks, is asking Caleb. already if she'd want to carry again. And Kayla's surprised. She's only been not pregnant for, I don't know, two months or something at that point. Her body definitely still needs time to recover. And this is when things really begin to change. And all these kind of warning signs, red flags, whatever you want to call them,

it's like the curtain kind of rises. And the idea that this couple just wanted a big family starts to seem less and less plausible. The police show up at the couple's house only two months after Kayla has given birth, and they find that one of the kids in the couple's care has ended up in the hospital with severe head injuries. And when they enter this house,

the couple, I should say, lives in a mansion in Arcadia, California, it's a wealthy city. They find that there are 15 other kids inside the house. What do the authorities learn about how those children are being treated? When they first come to the house, they're not so sure. Everything kind of looks okay. The kids are clean, but there's a lot of, you know, as there were in kind of Kayla's first realization of all this, a lot of weird things that they've never seen before. All of the kids' heads are shaved. The majority are under three years old. All of these kids were carried by surrogates. And so the police immediately wonder, you know, we don't know what this is yet, but is this a human trafficking situation? And at that very same time, the surrogates are kind of having the exact same question. So Kayla's in this surrogate group. They're starting to find one another online, learning that they're not the only one and saying, what do they want all these babies for? The cops,

you know, just through a separate track are coming into this house and also wondering, what do they want all these babies for? The cops tip off the FBI, and so do the surrogates. And so the FBI starts to get involved and asks the same question, what do they want all these babies for? What did they want all those babies for? At first, it made a lot of sense that everyone's mind kind of went to this idea of trafficking because it's a really unusual amount of children to have. However, we found no evidence and law enforcement found no evidence that the children were like going or being sold anywhere else.

And what seems to have resulted is a quite strange plan to have a lot of kids kind of in the mold of Elon Musk. If you don't make new humans, there's no humanity. and all the policies in the world don't matter. If people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words. So Guojun Schweng, the kind of patriarch of this family, the one whose sperm is in all of these children.

He is part of this kind of trend of kid maxing, of wanting this large family and brood. What he wants to do with those kids later is a bit of an outstanding mystery. I mean, they're all far too young to fully understand kind of what the plan was down the line. But he certainly was paying for their education, though that had a lot of problems, and for their health care, and for them to kind of live in this institutional-like setting under his watch. Institutional-like setting, what do the authorities learn about how he and this woman, Sylvia, have been treating the children? At first, they're kind of hesitant to

judge. And then they get all of these videotapes. 32 motion-activated cameras that were recording video and audio from the various rooms in this Arcadia mansion. And when they seize, they get a warrant to seize that footage, they see that the kids have been suffering constant emotional and physical abuse at the hands of nannies working inside the house. And it's frankly indisputable. I mean, they immediately take the kids into emergency foster care, and these children have remained separated from their parents ever since. Were the parents ever charged with anything? So a year and a half ago, the parents were arrested on suspicion of child abuse, but they were not charged.

The DA asked the police to keep investigating. So they were released. They didn't have to pay any bail. And almost a year and a half passed. And in that time, obviously, the parents continued. to have more children with more surrogates. They continue to hire even more surrogates. And in some cases, those children were then kind of removed

from the custody of the surrogates who wanted to keep them. And then just this week, we learned that the parents were arrested again. And this time, they were charged with several different counts related to child abuse. And this house could only be described as a house of horrors for these young, incredibly young children that had been brought to this house through this surrogacy process. This case is unprecedented. It is horrific. And the physical abuse, beating, and punishment that

these very young children received is despicable. And what about the surrogates? I mean, when this was all discovered, there were women who were pregnant with this couple's children. Presumably they did not give those kids over to this couple. What happened? A year ago, when the couple were arrested the first time, there were six women who were actively pregnant for the couple. And because the couple were released and had kind of hired attorneys and the situation was really confusing and happening across a couple different states, the couple ended up suing some of the surrogates for breach of contract. Some of these surrogates wanted to keep the kids because they weren't sure what was going on inside the house. It wasn't something that they had planned to do. They just wanted to help protect them, whether that's through being a foster parent or a temporary placement or something until they could find a safe home. But there was a lot of confusion since it was kind of unclear why the parents had been arrested and just released if it had just been a nanny or if the parents had been further involved. And so in that time, the parents were able to have several more children, some of which were brought to Los Angeles and placed in foster care

there, others who they are fighting for custody for in other courts. And a lot of the courts have kind of been waiting to see what will happen in L.A., courts in Pennsylvania and Georgia, in Virginia. So the arrest that happened this week, in some cases, it sounds like, might really speed up some of those court cases or kind of change the equation in terms of the parents' fitness to gain custody over these infants who are now, in some cases, over a year old. I emerged from your story feeling like these women, these surrogates, were really heroic. You know, they saw that something was going wrong here. They contacted the authorities.

They kept in touch with each other. What stories stayed with you from them? Yeah, there was a bunch of different really heart-wrenching stories. And I will say that, you know, they all made the decision that they would kind of try to keep the kids if they could. And what ended up happening then was kind of beyond their control because the real people who make that decision are the different social services agencies and the different counties where they were given birth and different judges and different family courts. And so what we saw on what's one of the kind of really high level things that stuck with me is how up to chance it was. In one of the counties, the kid was taken away immediately into foster care. The surrogate hasn't seen her

since. In another, the surrogate is still living with a child she carried and she's had the support of the social services agency in her county. Whether the child will still be able to stay with her is still moving through the courts. So it's been a kind of, you know, a matter of fate and chance, which is also not how it should work with something as high stakes as bringing a new human being into the world. What happened to Kayla at the end? Kayla ended up becoming a kind of whistleblower and the mother hen for all of these surrogates who were trying to figure out, what do I do? She was part of a group chat where the

surrogates were able to kind of bond with each other, trade notes, send the baby blankets they were knitting, trade advice in this completely unprecedented situation. And she's now suing the intended parents for fraud. After our story published in The New Yorker, the surrogates started working with a lawyer who is claiming that the parents deceived them. That's the New Yorkers, Ava Kaufman. Coming up, how and why was so much of this legal? Support the showtody comes from China. Is your summer fun catching up with you?

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Interested? And what if we added that this magical substance can dramatically lower your cholesterol, improve your mood, and keep your weight stable? No, it's not protein. It's actually fiber, the least sexy, most overlooked nutrient of all. But, What is fiber? How could one nutrient do all those amazing things? And how can you get enough? Is a powder you stir into some water going to do it for you? All that plus the strange tale of the gorilla poop obsessed father of cornflakes in the latest episode of Gastropod. Find gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Emmy Needfeld and I am a reporter at the Washington Sun who writes about surrogacy, IVF, and how how we build families. In the first half of the show, we heard this incredibly troubling story about a couple out in California, having many children through surrogates. That story illustrates a problem, which is that the United States does not regulate the surrogacy industry seemingly

at all. What is going on? Why not? The lack of federal regulation is both political and financial. Politically, this goes all the way back to the start of IVF. Anti-abortion Republicans were not comfortable with the idea of creating and destroying embryos during IVF, and so they fought against efforts to regulate it. People on the left were worried that limiting what kinds of technology you could access would lead to the government controlling who could have families. You still see these arguments today. People who think that IVF is murder don't want to have any surrogacy, and people on the left don't want the government saying who can and cannot have a family. One of the issues raised by the New Yorker's story is that there are agencies, surrogacy agencies that connect parents and potential surrogates.

And it makes you wonder who gets to do that? Who can own and operate a surrogacy agency in the U.S. today? Anyone. Oh. Oh, no. Only one state, New York, requires a special license, and everywhere else, it's easier to open an agency than a hot dog stand or a nail salon. This has seen the rise of so-called pop-up agencies where businesses come onto the scene. Nobody really knows who owns them or who's running them.

And so that has led to many people who aren't experienced who sign up with these agencies, then feeling like they weren't prepared or that they were deceived in entering the agreement. If something fills off, you're allowed to walk away. Pressure to sign quickly. Rushing is never a good sign. Vague compensation. Everything should be item. How do you screen? Where do you get your intended parents? And do you have in-house escrow? Do you have in-house legal? If they are not prepared to answer these questions easily, then they are not the right agency for you. Have we ever tried in the past to regulate this better? Have there been efforts made?

In the early days of surrogacy, in the 1980s, there was the case of Baby M. That was called traditional surrogacy where Mary Beth Whitehead was the surrogate, but it was also her ang. So the child she delivered was genetically related to her. I feel that nobody thinks about the child of these arrangements. I feel that, you know, people are just thinking of themselves. Their infertility, the mother who wants to do it. And this poor child is the one who's caught in the middle. After she gave birth, she changed her mind, she kidnapped the child, went on the run for several months, and it was a national crisis where this was all over the news.

and ultimately a judge in New Jersey ruled that the surrogacy arrangement was unenforceable. I always felt that I had the right to keep her. Commercial surrogacy arrangements became illegal in New Jersey, and they stayed illegal in New York until 2020. Part of why regulation looks the way it does is because in 1995, Congress passed a piece of legislation saying that there would be no federal funding for embryo research, which means no federal funding for IVF. that left all of the research, development, innovation up to the free market. And so while that could be seen as an attempt to regulate IVF, it actually meant that those things would no longer be under the government's purview. In the U.S., we've seen over the past few years some really high-profile cases that are making lawmakers reckon with the fact that we do not have laws around this.

Tell me about some of those cases. There's the Mark surrogacy case in California, which is both a really unique case and also illustrates some of the fears around Chinese intended parents coming to the United States to have their kids. This is part of larger geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China, which are playing out in the surrogacy industry. International surrogacy allows foreign nationals to essentially rent the wombs of American women to obtain U.S. citizenship for the U.S. citizenship for the surrogacy. their children. No sane country would ever allow this. The threat is obvious. Foreign adversaries have a backdoor to every privilege of being an American while spending no time, no time. They don't even have to show up in this country and not be, and their kids are not being taught to love our country. There's the case of Shubo, the Chinese video gaming billionaire, who is rumored to have more than

100 children via surrogacy in America. His story taps into fear. of birth tourism and people from other countries, especially China, coming to the United States to do surrogacy so that their kids are American citizens. Republican lawmakers are talking a lot about the idea that people could come from enemy countries, have American citizens, and raise them with the intent that they might one day become spies or president of the United States and be double actors. In Texas, there's the case of McKenna West. We're a show. We're a She learned at 20 weeks gestation that the baby was very sick. The intended parents asked her to get an abortion.

She refused to do so. McKenna went to Texas and began fighting for custody to keep the baby. You are pro-life, and so what did that bring up for you? It brought up a lot of fear. I just didn't know what to do. I felt very trapped due to this contract and felt like I had no voice. But I knew in my soul and my heart that I wanted to protect this little boy. While the parents objected, they wanted the baby.

And she petitioned the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. And finally, there's the case of Kyla Simpson in Florida, whom I wrote about for New York Magazine. And she gave birth for a single dad in China who wasn't there for the birth. He hadn't applied for a visa to come to the United States, and when he did apply, he was rejected. Kyla Simpson tried to adopt the kids and is now fighting for custody in a case that's still working its way through the Florida courts. I say our kids because blood doesn't matter to me. How did it look doesn't matter to me. Color doesn't matter.

I birthed them. These examples are extraordinary, and they point to just chaos, don't they? But how common are they? Are they outliers? Is this going on all the time? Most of the time things go right. In the academic papers around surrogacy, surrogates are usually happy with their experience. Attorneys and surrogates tell me that it's absolutely beautiful to hand people the baby that they've been working hard for for years and years and years. The issue is that when things do go wrong, there's often not a lot of recourse or there's a really big legal mess that parents and surrogates have to go through. I wonder if there is a case.

against more regulation. It seems, you know, as disastrous as some of these examples are, you said most of the time it does go right. And it seems like we could get into tricky territory if we start saying who can and can't have a kid. Surrogacy is already really time consuming. It often takes several years. And it's expensive, usually costing between $150 to $250,000 for a single pregnancy. Regulation tends to make things more expensive and take longer. A lot of people fear that if you introduce more requirements and more burdens, surrogacy will become even more out of reach to people. There's also the fear of government overreach. If you ask the government how many kids a gay couple should have, the answer might be zero. And that libertarian streak is driving a lot of opposition to things that most people might consider common sense.

For example, there's a lot of talk around whether intended parents should go through background checks before they have kids via surrogacy. Right now, no state in America requires intended parents to go through a criminal background check before having a kid. But critics of regulation say, you know, heteros don't need a background check to have sex in the back of a car and make a baby an old-fashioned way, so it's unfair to require that from people who need to do surrogacy to have a family. Most people can agree that surrogacy could be better regulated, but like many things in our country, it's almost impossible right now because of politics. Emmy Neatfeld is a reporter at the Washington's son. Ariana Espudo produced today's show and Domina El Sadi edited. David Tadishore engineered and Gabriel Dunitove check the facts.

I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.