In the hit TV show, “Succession,” an entitled, raucous family dukes it out in hopes of inheriting their father’s business empire. Even with all the heightened drama, it captures the essence that succession planning for corporations can be downright ugly.
In China, an eccentric tech executive believes he has found a way around this. Unlike most companies, it does not involve a formal planning process by a board of directors, an expensive headhunter, or grooming of internal talent. Xu Bo had another idea in mind, something straight out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: childbirth surrogacy.
Bo’s goal was simple: Pay American women with traits he deems desirable to be his surrogates, churning out dozens of U.S.-born children in the hope that one will eventually prove worthy of inheriting his empire. What for some families is a remarkable scientific breakthrough that allows parents unable to conceive to grow their family has, in other hands, become a tool to churn out human beings like entries on a balance sheet.
This commodification of children born through surrogacy is not happening in a vacuum. It is largely the result of a permissive regulatory environment surrounding the industry. Bo is among many of China’s wealthiest elites who, barred from doing so in their own country and much of the rest of the Western World, turn to America’s lax surrogacy laws to exploit the system.
And the abuses of surrogacy extend far beyond business empire building. Alarmingly, recent cases show it being weaponized by child trafficking rings.
In one case involving a Texan just this past year, a woman was contacted by what appeared to be a legitimate surrogacy business and asked to carry a couple’s child. She agreed. The baby she delivered ultimately ended up among 20 others in a California home. One of those children, just two months old, was hospitalized with injuries that showed clear signs of abuse. The intended parents—Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang, who had paid the surrogates handsomely—were arrested on suspicion of felony child endangerment and neglect, and all 21 children were taken into protective custody.
These shocking stories are symptoms of an increasingly common worldview—one that treats babies as dehumanized units rather than as precious lives knitted together by a purposeful Creator.
Consider again the Chinese businessman. His goal is not to create life for its own sake, but to achieve a measurable outcome—a successor with the right aptitude, personality, and intelligence. From there, the next step is obvious—genetic engineering, the intentional manipulation of genes to produce desirable traits.
And this research is no longer confined to theory.
In 2019, a Chinese researcher announced the birth of the world’s first CRISPR gene-edited babies. It was a Tower of Babel moment that rocked the scientific community to its core, with even China incarcerating the scientists involved on grounds of illegal medical practice. Since then, fertility clinics have pursued sex selection, embryo screening and scoring for disease risk—allowing parents to discard embryos with “undesirable” profiles—and, more recently, startups have promised wealthy clients the ability to screen embryos for IQ, physical traits, and even personality. Perhaps it is no surprise that the same technocrats who view humanity as an inconvenient roadblock are the very funders of many of these designer baby projects.
Clearly, that parents throughout the world are playing god and heading the way of designer babies, playing the law of large numbers game with surrogacy, and aborting life if a future child doesn’t meet some quantifiable score says something truly chilling about our culture. And it’s a rather uncanny reflection of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” where children are designed in labs and rubber stamped with a preordained value from Alpha (top of the caste, destined for success) to Epsilon (the undesirables, left to fill the most menial roles).
The fact that this demented view of human life is permitted—and flourishing—right here in our backyard demands political scrutiny. A surrogacy system purported to honor life is being exploited by godless elites who openly debase it. As with all disruptive technologies, one man’s tool can quickly become another man’s weapon. And when that weapon is turned against the most innocent and vulnerable among us, legislative guardrails are not optional—humanity depends on it.