In a story that starts like a fairy tale and veers into a legal and ethical maze, the New Yorker digs into how one Los Angeles couple quietly amassed more than 20 babies through American surrogates—only to have those children swept into foster care. Reporter Ava Kofman follows Kayla Elliott, a Texas mom who signed on with the Mark Surrogacy agency in 2024 to carry a child for a wealthy Chinese couple, 64-year-old businessman Guojun Xuan and 36-year-old real-estate agent and agency owner Silvia Zhang. Elliott thought she was helping a small family grow. She later learned, however, that the pair had roughly 20 children other than the one she carried, mostly toddlers, many of whom were born via different surrogates at the same time. There were also rumors that the babies were being created to be sold, which both Xuan and Zhang consistently denied.
"I thought i was having a baby that was being sent to a loving family, not to a situation like this," Elliott texted to Zhang after finding out some of this information. Kofman reconstructs what was happening inside the couple's 10,000-square-foot Arcadia mansion, where little ones with shaved heads were kept under heavy surveillance and watched by nannies captured on video striking and disciplining them. When one infant landed in a Los Angeles hospital with severe head injuries, police finally visited the home and seized footage, and child welfare workers removed the children. So how could this have gone on for so long before it was busted? Thank a virtually unregulated US surrogacy system, willing professionals, and a deference to affluence, posits Kofman. More here.
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