The middle-aged father conceived a child as a surrogate

True Story Plan

2024-04-25 17:30Published in Beijing, creators in the field of documentary

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Recently, the phenomenon of middle-aged men hiding their families from surrogacy has been reported from time to time. In a county town in northern Jiangsu, Xu Shuqing (pseudonym), who graduated from graduate school not long ago, was the last person in the family to know about his father's surrogacy. After a long period of planning, her father conceived and gave birth to a boy in 2022.

The surrogate child tormented Xu Shuqing and her mother. The father's betrayal, the anger and confusion of the blood relatives gradually disintegrated the original order and ethics of the family.

The premeditation of the son

When Xu Shuqing was 24 years old, she had an extra "younger brother" out of thin air.

In July 2022, she received a message from her mother's friend, and the aunt, who was good friends with her mother, reminded her that her mother had been in a bad mood recently and that she could spend more time with her. She asked her mother what had happened, but she was silent. After a few days, the mother finally couldn't hold back and confided in her.

That night, she had a voice call with her mother in her room. As usual, her mother talked about hoping that Xu Shuqing would get married and have children, and Xu Shuqing also expressed her resistance as usual. Only this time, the mother's emotions were stained with extra grievances, and she bitterly told the secret of the family that had been suppressed in her heart for a long time: she told her daughter that her husband, her father, had given birth to a son through surrogacy outside without telling them, and the baby was already a few months old.

Xu Shuqing cried uncomfortably after hearing this. She felt sorry for her mother, and she didn't do anything wrong, but she had to bear the consequences. There have been conflicts between parents in the past, but the family relationship has always been relatively smooth, and the family of three can support each other. This time, she had a premonition that the family was going to fall apart.

My father's plan succeeded.

As early as when Xu Shuqing was in college, she and her mother unexpectedly learned that her father wanted to get a child through surrogacy. At that time, Xu Shuqing's mother found clues from her husband's chat records, and he seemed to be delivering nutritional products to a woman who was preparing to get pregnant. However, because of physical reasons, that surrogacy did not work out.

After the matter of looking for "surrogacy" outside his wife was discovered, Xu Shuqing's father wrote a letter of guarantee, promising that he would never commit it again, otherwise he would take the initiative to withdraw from the marriage, leave the house, and all the property would belong to his wife and daughter.

However, promises and interests can't tie up middle-aged men who want to have children.

The mother said that after this incident was exposed, the father claimed that it was because the surrogacy fee paid last time could not be refunded, so he ran to try it again, and this time he gave birth to a son.

Xu Shuqing's father's actions are not alone.

In 2024, in a series of reports on Henan TV exposing the black industry of surrogacy, there will be two cases of middle-aged men giving birth through surrogacy without telling their wives and other family members.

Ms. Gao, 30, reported to the media that her father had given birth to a surrogate child without telling the family. According to Ms. Gao, when the two-child policy was liberalized, her father especially wanted a son, and the mother was in her 40s at the time. In July 2023, the father "customized" a son through a surrogacy agency. When the fetus was 5 months old, Ms. Gao's father took his wife's ID card and applied for a birth permit for the newborn. During the examination, the Family Planning Office found that the child's mother was abnormally old, so they went to investigate, and Ms. Gao and her mother learned about the situation.

The surrogacy agreement and chat records provided to reporters by Ms. Gao show that her father chose a 24-year-old woman to provide eggs for 40,000 yuan, and the surrogate mother is a 35-year-old woman who has previously given birth to two children. The overall cost of surrogacy is 550,000 yuan, which is paid in installments with the month of fetal growth.

Network Diagram | The surrogacy agreement disclosed by the program team

Ms. Guo, a 53-year-old native of Hunan, did not discover her husband's deception until the birth of her child. One day in September 2022, she came home from work to find a strange woman holding a baby in the house, the strange woman claimed to be a nanny, and said that the child was Ms. Guo's baby. Looking through the child's vaccine book, she found that her name was written in the "Mother" column. She and her husband have a 29-year-old daughter, and her husband has the idea of having another child because his daughter is unwilling to get married and have children. She relayed to reporters that her husband once reprimanded her daughter, saying, "You can't make my grandfather work, what's the use of raising you" and "no queen is equal to unfilial piety". She also saw the chat history between her husband and the surrogacy agency, and the husband was very satisfied with the baby girl who was surrogacy this time and hoped to order another boy next time.

Xu Shuqing has always known that wanting a son is his father's obsession.

In November 2013, the state began to implement the "single two-child" policy, and by 2015, the two-child policy was fully liberalized. That year, Xu Shuqing was in her second year of high school, and many relatives around her in the county where she lived began to plan to have a second child. Xu Shuqing's parents are nearly middle-aged and began to plan to have another child, when her mother told her that she wanted to have another daughter as good as her, but Xu Shuqing could perceive that her father wanted a son very much.

In Xu Shuqing's sophomore year of high school, her mother successfully became pregnant.

My father went to a friend to tell his fortune. After that, Xu Shuqing heard her father arguing angrily at home. The fortune teller said that there was a 60% chance that the child would be a girl, and even if it was a boy, "it could be a demon king of the world". Knowing such a result, Xu Shuqing's father proposed to let his wife go and kill the child. He vented his emotions, and his attitude towards his wife started from anger and gradually turned into coldness, and he had a cold war with his wife.

During that time, Xu Shuqing found that her mother had great mood swings. Not long after, the fetus in her mother's womb was found to have stopped beating during the prenatal examination, and finally the mother had to perform an abortion and send away the fetus that died early.

Since that incident, Xu Shuqing has been completely disappointed in her father. She found it difficult to forgive her father for hurting her mother, and she did not believe that her parents' intimacy could be maintained after that. The mother chose to continue living with the father, and given their age, the two no longer tried to conceive.

Xu Shuqing thinks about it now, and his father's desire for his son has not stopped. Because of her father's behavior back then, she was not shocked when she learned that her father had given birth to a child by surrogacy, but felt that this was in line with her father's style of behavior all along.

After his father's first surrogacy was revealed, Xu Shuqing's mother found the "suspect" who helped him make a surrogacy from his mobile phone. That person was the owner of a massage parlor in the county. The man and his wife had run a shop in the neighborhood where Xu Shuqing lived for many years, and when she was a child, she fell and injured herself, and her father took her there for a massage. When my mother was pregnant with her second child, the person who told my father's fortune was also the owner of this massage parlor.

My father was a good friend of the massage parlor owner and often played cards together.

For the first surrogacy, the owner of the massage parlor introduced his relatives in the countryside to Xu Shuqing's father as a "pregnant mother". For the second surrogacy, Xu Shuqing's mother heard that the owner of the massage parlor sent his wife to take care of the pregnant mother's confinement.

The mother felt that her husband was careless in making friends and was influenced by bad people. Xu Shuqing feels that what kind of friends an adult makes is completely his own choice, and the blame cannot be passed on to others.

In 2001, the former Ministry of Health promulgated the Measures for the Administration of Human Assisted Reproductive Technology, which clearly stipulates that "it is forbidden to buy and sell gametes, zygotes and embryos in any form." Medical institutions and medical personnel are not allowed to practice any form of surrogacy technique". For more than 20 years, the black industry of surrogacy has been quietly developing.

In 2024, a reporter from Henan TV will secretly visit a number of surrogacy agencies and find that most of these agencies that provide surrogacy are gynecological outpatient clinics, private hospitals, and some package themselves as cultural media companies. According to an agency official, the company is able to complete 160 to 180 surrogacy orders per year. He refers to the industry as a "blue ocean" and claims that business is expanding every year.

Surrogacy agencies will secretly recruit women and surrogate mothers who provide eggs online and offline under the headline of recruiting elites and recruiting volunteers. The women are placed in poor family hotels and wait for customers to pick them up. The reporter of "Nanfeng Window" once secretly visited a surrogacy agency, and the person in charge of the agency said that the price of eggs depends on the owner of the egg, and it takes 100,000 to 300,000 yuan if the owner of the egg is good-looking, outstanding and highly educated. If the woman who needs to provide eggs is a graduate of "985 College", the agency can also help find it.

In order to avoid legal risks, the surrogacy agency will open up the hospital link and make the surrogate mother hospitalized with the client's information. After the child is born, it naturally falls into the name of the customer. There are even public hospitals that sell birth certificates. In November 2023, Xiangyang Jianqiao Hospital was reported for selling medical birth certificates, and six suspects were arrested.

Wide and vertical environment

At the end of July 2022, Xu Shuqing returned to her hometown in northern Jiangsu. Her parents had separated, and she came back to help her mother draft the divorce agreement. My father went home. At home, Xu Shuqing and her mother loudly blamed their father for their fault, while the middle-aged man remained silent almost the entire time and was eventually kicked out of the house by the mother and daughter.

Then several quarrels broke out in the family, and Xu Shuqing's grandfather and grandmother argued with the mother and daughter on behalf of her father. They defended their sons.

Grandma also emphasized to Xu Shuqing that her son's only wish in this life is to "give birth to a son", and she doesn't want her son to die of depression. Xu Shuqing suddenly felt ridiculous.

Mother told Xu Shuqing that at first, Xu Shuqing's grandfather and grandmother helped her father hide the news together. Perhaps because of the previous promise of "leaving the house after surrogacy", Xu Shuqing's father concealed the news from his wife and raised the child at his parents' house after surrogacy. The old couple stood on the side of Xu Shuqing's father and kept the matter a secret. It wasn't until one day that Xu Shuqing's aunt went to the house as a guest and saw the old couple taking care of an infant baby, and after asking about the origin of the child, she turned around and told Xu Shuqing's mother, which allowed the mother and daughter to understand the truth.

Having a child has never been only a contradiction between this middle-aged couple.

When Xu Shuqing and her grandparents argued, the old people always emphasized emotionally: Because he had no son, Xu Shuqing's father couldn't hold his head up among relatives and friends.

In Xu Shuqing's observation, his father's clan concept is very important. He followed the "General Association" account of his surname clan on the short video. After surrogacy gave birth, he and Xu Shuqing also said that he needed a son to go to his grave in the future. According to his own words, especially after hearing that his daughter mentioned that she did not want to have children, he felt even more desperate about passing on the lineage.

Network Diagram | Footage of a clan gathering in a short video

Behind his father, who stubbornly wants to have children, what supports him is a set of indestructible patriarchal thinking.

After the father's concealment of the mother and daughter's search for surrogacy was revealed, Xu Shuqing and her mother reviewed their father's trajectory in the past few years. They found that in the years when their father was desperate for a second child, he moved to a township near his hometown. In Xu Shuqing's understanding, because the family needs male labor, the atmosphere of preference for sons over daughters is often heavier. The father would often deal with township enterprises at work, and these business owners would probably also prefer to let their sons inherit the family factory.

Xu Shuqing guessed that probably in the ears and eyes, the father's desire to give birth to a son became more and more urgent.

Xu Shuqing's family lives in the county town of northern Jiangsu, where some of Shandong's folk culture is followed. When she was a teenager, she was unaware of it, but after going to university in other places, she realized that her hometown seemed to pay special attention to clan and traditions: kowtow to the elders during New Year's greetings, and pay special attention to the etiquette of seating and toasting at dinner. When she was about to face a career choice in her junior and senior years, relatives and friends in her hometown often persuaded her to take the civil service exam. Not long ago, her uncle also sent her a message saying that she and her cousin, who is also an only child, are representatives of the prosperity of the family, and they must never forget their beliefs.

Grandma told Xu Shuqing that her father couldn't hold his head up in his hometown because he didn't have a son, and Xu Shuqing never felt that others had blunt discrimination against their family. When she was a child, she often had relatives tease her and say that she wanted her parents to have another younger sibling. Now that she thinks about it, she thinks that adults all default to referring to having another "younger brother".

When Xu Shuqing was in middle school, most of the girls in her class had a little brother. At that time, she felt a sense of superiority in her heart, and felt that the patriarchal atmosphere did not invade her family. Now faced with the fact that her father gave birth to a child by surrogacy, she feels somewhat ironic.

Men, women

His father didn't want a divorce, but when Xu Shuqing and his mother proposed to stab his father's behavior into the unit, he agreed to sign a divorce agreement. After a one-month cooling-off period, Xu Shuqing's parents officially divorced at the end of August 2022. Xu Shuqing later learned that her mother often cried alone in her room during that time.

Xu Shuqing has seen his father's child. On the first day of the Spring Festival in 2023, after discussing with her mother, Xu Shuqing still decided to go to her grandparents' house to pay New Year's greetings. The father and his children were also there. After entering the door, Xu Shuqing greeted the elders and accepted the red envelope. Grandma took the baby out of the room and asked Xu Shuqing to play with her "younger brother".

When she saw that child, a wave of hatred rose in her heart, and a thought couldn't help but pop up: It was this child who ruined my life.

However, Xu Shuqing quickly calmed down, she could figure it out, the fault was the adult. In her ears, the grandmother's repeated words "brother" aroused her even greater disgust, and she refused to make contact with the child. Perhaps because of her blunt tone, the elders put the child back in the room and quarreled with Xu Shuqing in another room, saying that she "disrespected her ancestors" and "didn't recognize her six relatives".

Self-built houses in the county are less soundproof. Xu Shuqing and his grandparents quarreled loudly in one room, while his father was always with his son in the other room. My father must have heard what they were arguing about, but he never came forward.

Looking back, Xu Shuqing realized that she had actually been disappointed in her father since childhood. Her father is often absent, and she doesn't expect her father to accompany her, because he is overly irritable, and Xu Shuqing is always unhappy when father and daughter are alone.

The father of his childhood best friend would take his daughter out with her classmates, while his own father would always socialize a lot, often coming home drunk late at night. I can't remember whether she was in elementary school or kindergarten, but once, when her father took her to drink a wedding drink, she knocked over a paper cup, and her father suddenly stood up and lost his temper with her, in front of all the strangers. That day, Xu Shuqing ran home alone crying.

When she was in high school, Xu Shuqing discovered that her father intended to "return to the family". During that time, her father cooked her breakfast and took her to and from school. Her mother would care about her school life when she picked her up, and she would also chat with her mother, while sitting in her father's car, father and daughter rarely talked, and she often heard her father scold people who violated traffic rules, which only made her feel irritated. In Xu Shuqing's heart, her father has never reached the standard of a "good father", and she doesn't like to get along with her father so much.

After learning that her father gave birth to a child by surrogacy, Xu Shuqing looked back on her relationship with her father, and she guessed that maybe it was the days of returning to the family that made her father realize that only a daughter like her was not enough.

The mother once revealed to Xu Shuqing her attitude towards her husband's surrogacy and childbirth.

She said that in fact, after discovering her husband's surrogacy failure for the first time, she once proposed that since her husband really wanted a child, she was willing to accompany her husband to go through the procedures at the relevant institutions, hoping that she could know the whole process. She is willing to pretend to be pregnant for ten months and not go out until the child is born, so that the identity of this child is justified in the eyes of outsiders.

The mother expressed her grievances to Xu Shuqing: she didn't expect that she was obviously willing to cooperate and sacrifice to such an extent, but her husband still chose to deceive her and give birth to the child.

She then confided in her deeper suspicions: maybe her husband did not go to surrogacy, but gave birth to a child with a lover. She can forgive her husband for hiding the surrogate, but she can never forgive cheating.

Surprised, Xu Shuqing couldn't understand why the mother, as a woman, could accept "surrogacy". When she first learned that her father was trying to give birth to a child by surrogacy, Xu Shuqing was ashamed of her father. She told her friends that she couldn't imagine that as a staunch feminist, something like this would happen at home.

During her college years, Xu Shuqing re-understood the social significance behind the technology of "surrogacy" when she studied feminism, and realized that it was the exploitation of women. She explained to her mother that once surrogacy is legal, there will be many women involved in it, actively or passively supporting the family in a way that seriously harms the body. The mother understood what Xu Shuqing meant, but said that she could not reach her daughter's ideological realm.

More than a year after the divorce procedures were completed, Xu Shuqing's father and mother have been pulling on remarriage.

The father wants to remarry, and the mother is obsessed with seeing the surrogacy formalities to confirm that the ex-husband was a real surrogate and not cheating, and then considers forgiveness. Xu Shuqing's father has been silent about this, and has not shown the relevant agreements and documents to his ex-wife. In April 2023, the mother introduced one of Xu Shuqing's sisters and brother-in-law to her father for surrogacy consultation. Xu Shuqing guessed that part of the mother's doing this was to verify whether the father really had a way to surrogate. In the end, the matter was also settled.

The pull continues until 2024. Mother told Xu Shuqing that until now, she still feels disgusted when she sees Xu Shuqing's father.

After the divorce, Xu Shuqing's parents have been maintaining superficial harmony in front of outsiders, hiding conflicts and divorce. My father still went to my grandparents' house from time to time to deliver some food and snacks. However, he always hurriedly put his things down and left, so his grandfather saw the clues. Mother didn't want Xu Shuqing's grandparents to worry, but she told the truth under questioning. The old man felt sorry for his daughter and supported her divorce.

At the parents' party, relatives would reassure her mother, but several cousins would also say that they understood Xu Shuqing's father's approach. A cousin persuaded Xu Shuqing to forgive his father, saying that he felt that his father was not bad, and what he did was not so excessive. There is also a cousin who analyzes his mother, and with the age of his mother, it will be difficult to find a suitable partner if he goes on a blind date to get married.

After the party ended, Xu Shuqing hurriedly told her mother, don't believe those words. She told her mother that she didn't have to have a man in her life, and wanted to encourage her mother to get out of the county town that made her miserable and go to a bigger city to live a new life. But her mother revealed to her her deep fear of loneliness.

Xu Shuqing guessed that out of disgust with her father, her mother should not easily remarry in the short term. But I don't think it's possible to say for sure, maybe my mother will be unable to resist loneliness in the end, and she will still forgive my father. In the final analysis, Xu Shuqing is a person who watches the fire from the other side, and there is no way to make decisions for her mother.

She has her own problems to face. She has become cracked and mottled in the small home that was once complete and harmonious. Her parents used to support her, but now she realizes that she may not have the retreat of "going home" and needs to rely more on herself.

In the future, there are many troubles, such as the father's child who is growing up, and I don't know if he will have a connection with her mother and her. But she didn't want to think about these things at the moment, she didn't want to advance her anxiety.

- END -

Written by Tong Chang

Wen Lihong Recently, the phenomenon of middle-aged men hiding their families from surrogacy has been reported from time to time. In a county town in northern Jiangsu, Xu Shuqing (pseudonym), who graduated from graduate school not long ago, was the last person in the family to know about his father's surrogacy. After a long period of planning, her father conceived and gave birth to a boy in 2022.

The surrogate child tormented Xu Shuqing and her mother. The father's betrayal, the anger and confusion of the blood relatives gradually disintegrated the original order and ethics of the family.

The premeditation of the son

When Xu Shuqing was 24 years old, she had an extra "younger brother" out of thin air.

In July 2022, she received a message from her mother's friend, and the aunt, who was good friends with her mother, reminded her that her mother had been in a bad mood recently and that she could spend more time with her. She asked her mother what had happened, but she was silent. After a few days, the mother finally couldn't hold back and confided in her.

That night, she had a voice call with her mother in her room. As usual, her mother talked about hoping that Xu Shuqing would get married and have children, and Xu Shuqing also expressed her resistance as usual. Only this time, the mother's emotions were stained with extra grievances, and she bitterly told the secret of the family that had been suppressed in her heart for a long time: she told her daughter that her husband, her father, had given birth to a son through surrogacy outside without telling them, and the baby was already a few months old.

Xu Shuqing cried uncomfortably after hearing this. She felt sorry for her mother, and she didn't do anything wrong, but she had to bear the consequences. There have been conflicts between parents in the past, but the family relationship has always been relatively smooth, and the family of three can support each other. This time, she had a premonition that the family was going to fall apart.

My father's plan succeeded.

As early as when Xu Shuqing was in college, she and her mother unexpectedly learned that her father wanted to get a child through surrogacy. At that time, Xu Shuqing's mother found clues from her husband's chat records, and he seemed to be delivering nutritional products to a woman who was preparing to get pregnant. However, because of physical reasons, that surrogacy did not work out.

After the matter of looking for "surrogacy" outside his wife was discovered, Xu Shuqing's father wrote a letter of guarantee, promising that he would never commit it again, otherwise he would take the initiative to withdraw from the marriage, leave the house, and all the property would belong to his wife and daughter.

However, promises and interests can't tie up middle-aged men who want to have children.

The mother said that after this incident was exposed, the father claimed that it was because the surrogacy fee paid last time could not be refunded, so he ran to try it again, and this time he gave birth to a son.

Xu Shuqing's father's actions are not alone.

In 2024, in a series of reports on Henan TV exposing the black industry of surrogacy, there will be two cases of middle-aged men giving birth through surrogacy without telling their wives and other family members.

Ms. Gao, 30, reported to the media that her father had given birth to a surrogate child without telling the family. According to Ms. Gao, when the two-child policy was liberalized, her father especially wanted a son, and the mother was in her 40s at the time. In July 2023, the father "customized" a son through a surrogacy agency. When the fetus was 5 months old, Ms. Gao's father took his wife's ID card and applied for a birth permit for the newborn. During the examination, the Family Planning Office found that the child's mother was abnormally old, so they went to investigate, and Ms. Gao and her mother learned about the situation.

The surrogacy agreement and chat records provided to reporters by Ms. Gao show that her father chose a 24-year-old woman to provide eggs for 40,000 yuan, and the surrogate mother is a 35-year-old woman who has previously given birth to two children. The overall cost of surrogacy is 550,000 yuan, which is paid in installments with the month of fetal growth.

Network Diagram | The surrogacy agreement disclosed by the program team

Ms. Guo, a 53-year-old native of Hunan, did not discover her husband's deception until the birth of her child. One day in September 2022, she came home from work to find a strange woman holding a baby in the house, the strange woman claimed to be a nanny, and said that the child was Ms. Guo's baby. Looking through the child's vaccine book, she found that her name was written in the "Mother" column. She and her husband have a 29-year-old daughter, and her husband has the idea of having another child because his daughter is unwilling to get married and have children. She relayed to reporters that her husband once reprimanded her daughter, saying, "You can't make my grandfather work, what's the use of raising you" and "no queen is equal to unfilial piety". She also saw the chat history between her husband and the surrogacy agency, and the husband was very satisfied with the baby girl who was surrogacy this time and hoped to order another boy next time.

Xu Shuqing has always known that wanting a son is his father's obsession.

In November 2013, the state began to implement the "single two-child" policy, and by 2015, the two-child policy was fully liberalized. That year, Xu Shuqing was in her second year of high school, and many relatives around her in the county where she lived began to plan to have a second child. Xu Shuqing's parents are nearly middle-aged and began to plan to have another child, when her mother told her that she wanted to have another daughter as good as her, but Xu Shuqing could perceive that her father wanted a son very much.

In Xu Shuqing's sophomore year of high school, her mother successfully became pregnant.

My father went to a friend to tell his fortune. After that, Xu Shuqing heard her father arguing angrily at home. The fortune teller said that there was a 60% chance that the child would be a girl, and even if it was a boy, "it could be a demon king of the world". Knowing such a result, Xu Shuqing's father proposed to let his wife go and kill the child. He vented his emotions, and his attitude towards his wife started from anger and gradually turned into coldness, and he had a cold war with his wife.

During that time, Xu Shuqing found that her mother had great mood swings. Not long after, the fetus in her mother's womb was found to have stopped beating during the prenatal examination, and finally the mother had to perform an abortion and send away the fetus that died early.

Since that incident, Xu Shuqing has been completely disappointed in her father. She found it difficult to forgive her father for hurting her mother, and she did not believe that her parents' intimacy could be maintained after that. The mother chose to continue living with the father, and given their age, the two no longer tried to conceive.

Xu Shuqing thinks about it now, and his father's desire for his son has not stopped. Because of her father's behavior back then, she was not shocked when she learned that her father had given birth to a child by surrogacy, but felt that this was in line with her father's style of behavior all along.

After his father's first surrogacy was revealed, Xu Shuqing's mother found the "suspect" who helped him make a surrogacy from his mobile phone. That person was the owner of a massage parlor in the county. The man and his wife had run a shop in the neighborhood where Xu Shuqing lived for many years, and when she was a child, she fell and injured herself, and her father took her there for a massage. When my mother was pregnant with her second child, the person who told my father's fortune was also the owner of this massage parlor.

My father was a good friend of the massage parlor owner and often played cards together.

For the first surrogacy, the owner of the massage parlor introduced his relatives in the countryside to Xu Shuqing's father as a "pregnant mother". For the second surrogacy, Xu Shuqing's mother heard that the owner of the massage parlor sent his wife to take care of the pregnant mother's confinement.

The mother felt that her husband was careless in making friends and was influenced by bad people. Xu Shuqing feels that what kind of friends an adult makes is completely his own choice, and the blame cannot be passed on to others.

In 2001, the former Ministry of Health promulgated the Measures for the Administration of Human Assisted Reproductive Technology, which clearly stipulates that "it is forbidden to buy and sell gametes, zygotes and embryos in any form." Medical institutions and medical personnel are not allowed to practice any form of surrogacy technique". For more than 20 years, the black industry of surrogacy has been quietly developing.

In 2024, a reporter from Henan TV will secretly visit a number of surrogacy agencies and find that most of these agencies that provide surrogacy are gynecological outpatient clinics, private hospitals, and some package themselves as cultural media companies. According to an agency official, the company is able to complete 160 to 180 surrogacy orders per year. He refers to the industry as a "blue ocean" and claims that business is expanding every year.

Surrogacy agencies will secretly recruit women and surrogate mothers who provide eggs online and offline under the headline of recruiting elites and recruiting volunteers. The women are placed in poor family hotels and wait for customers to pick them up. The reporter of "Nanfeng Window" once secretly visited a surrogacy agency, and the person in charge of the agency said that the price of eggs depends on the owner of the egg, and it takes 100,000 to 300,000 yuan if the owner of the egg is good-looking, outstanding and highly educated. If the woman who needs to provide eggs is a graduate of "985 College", the agency can also help find it.

In order to avoid legal risks, the surrogacy agency will open up the hospital link and make the surrogate mother hospitalized with the client's information. After the child is born, it naturally falls into the name of the customer. There are even public hospitals that sell birth certificates. In November 2023, Xiangyang Jianqiao Hospital was reported for selling medical birth certificates, and six suspects were arrested.

Wide and vertical environment

At the end of July 2022, Xu Shuqing returned to her hometown in northern Jiangsu. Her parents had separated, and she came back to help her mother draft the divorce agreement. My father went home. At home, Xu Shuqing and her mother loudly blamed their father for their fault, while the middle-aged man remained silent almost the entire time and was eventually kicked out of the house by the mother and daughter.

Then several quarrels broke out in the family, and Xu Shuqing's grandfather and grandmother argued with the mother and daughter on behalf of her father. They defended their sons.

Grandma also emphasized to Xu Shuqing that her son's only wish in this life is to "give birth to a son", and she doesn't want her son to die of depression. Xu Shuqing suddenly felt ridiculous.

Mother told Xu Shuqing that at first, Xu Shuqing's grandfather and grandmother helped her father hide the news together. Perhaps because of the previous promise of "leaving the house after surrogacy", Xu Shuqing's father concealed the news from his wife and raised the child at his parents' house after surrogacy. The old couple stood on the side of Xu Shuqing's father and kept the matter a secret. It wasn't until one day that Xu Shuqing's aunt went to the house as a guest and saw the old couple taking care of an infant baby, and after asking about the origin of the child, she turned around and told Xu Shuqing's mother, which allowed the mother and daughter to understand the truth.

Having a child has never been only a contradiction between this middle-aged couple.

When Xu Shuqing and her grandparents argued, the old people always emphasized emotionally: Because he had no son, Xu Shuqing's father couldn't hold his head up among relatives and friends.

In Xu Shuqing's observation, his father's clan concept is very important. He followed the "General Association" account of his surname clan on the short video. After surrogacy gave birth, he and Xu Shuqing also said that he needed a son to go to his grave in the future. According to his own words, especially after hearing that his daughter mentioned that she did not want to have children, he felt even more desperate about passing on the lineage.

Network Diagram | Footage of a clan gathering in a short video

Behind his father, who stubbornly wants to have children, what supports him is a set of indestructible patriarchal thinking.

After the father's concealment of the mother and daughter's search for surrogacy was revealed, Xu Shuqing and her mother reviewed their father's trajectory in the past few years. They found that in the years when their father was desperate for a second child, he moved to a township near his hometown. In Xu Shuqing's understanding, because the family needs male labor, the atmosphere of preference for sons over daughters is often heavier. The father would often deal with township enterprises at work, and these business owners would probably also prefer to let their sons inherit the family factory.

Xu Shuqing guessed that probably in the ears and eyes, the father's desire to give birth to a son became more and more urgent.

Xu Shuqing's family lives in the county town of northern Jiangsu, where some of Shandong's folk culture is followed. When she was a teenager, she was unaware of it, but after going to university in other places, she realized that her hometown seemed to pay special attention to clan and traditions: kowtow to the elders during New Year's greetings, and pay special attention to the etiquette of seating and toasting at dinner. When she was about to face a career choice in her junior and senior years, relatives and friends in her hometown often persuaded her to take the civil service exam. Not long ago, her uncle also sent her a message saying that she and her cousin, who is also an only child, are representatives of the prosperity of the family, and they must never forget their beliefs.

Grandma told Xu Shuqing that her father couldn't hold his head up in his hometown because he didn't have a son, and Xu Shuqing never felt that others had blunt discrimination against their family. When she was a child, she often had relatives tease her and say that she wanted her parents to have another younger sibling. Now that she thinks about it, she thinks that adults all default to referring to having another "younger brother".

When Xu Shuqing was in middle school, most of the girls in her class had a little brother. At that time, she felt a sense of superiority in her heart, and felt that the patriarchal atmosphere did not invade her family. Now faced with the fact that her father gave birth to a child by surrogacy, she feels somewhat ironic.

Men, women

His father didn't want a divorce, but when Xu Shuqing and his mother proposed to stab his father's behavior into the unit, he agreed to sign a divorce agreement. After a one-month cooling-off period, Xu Shuqing's parents officially divorced at the end of August 2022. Xu Shuqing later learned that her mother often cried alone in her room during that time.

Xu Shuqing has seen his father's child. On the first day of the Spring Festival in 2023, after discussing with her mother, Xu Shuqing still decided to go to her grandparents' house to pay New Year's greetings. The father and his children were also there. After entering the door, Xu Shuqing greeted the elders and accepted the red envelope. Grandma took the baby out of the room and asked Xu Shuqing to play with her "younger brother".

When she saw that child, a wave of hatred rose in her heart, and a thought couldn't help but pop up: It was this child who ruined my life.

However, Xu Shuqing quickly calmed down, she could figure it out, the fault was the adult. In her ears, the grandmother's repeated words "brother" aroused her even greater disgust, and she refused to make contact with the child. Perhaps because of her blunt tone, the elders put the child back in the room and quarreled with Xu Shuqing in another room, saying that she "disrespected her ancestors" and "didn't recognize her six relatives".

Self-built houses in the county are less soundproof. Xu Shuqing and his grandparents quarreled loudly in one room, while his father was always with his son in the other room. My father must have heard what they were arguing about, but he never came forward.

Looking back, Xu Shuqing realized that she had actually been disappointed in her father since childhood. Her father is often absent, and she doesn't expect her father to accompany her, because he is overly irritable, and Xu Shuqing is always unhappy when father and daughter are alone.

The father of his childhood best friend would take his daughter out with her classmates, while his own father would always socialize a lot, often coming home drunk late at night. I can't remember whether she was in elementary school or kindergarten, but once, when her father took her to drink a wedding drink, she knocked over a paper cup, and her father suddenly stood up and lost his temper with her, in front of all the strangers. That day, Xu Shuqing ran home alone crying.

When she was in high school, Xu Shuqing discovered that her father intended to "return to the family". During that time, her father cooked her breakfast and took her to and from school. Her mother would care about her school life when she picked her up, and she would also chat with her mother, while sitting in her father's car, father and daughter rarely talked, and she often heard her father scold people who violated traffic rules, which only made her feel irritated. In Xu Shuqing's heart, her father has never reached the standard of a "good father", and she doesn't like to get along with her father so much.

After learning that her father gave birth to a child by surrogacy, Xu Shuqing looked back on her relationship with her father, and she guessed that maybe it was the days of returning to the family that made her father realize that only a daughter like her was not enough.

The mother once revealed to Xu Shuqing her attitude towards her husband's surrogacy and childbirth.

She said that in fact, after discovering her husband's surrogacy failure for the first time, she once proposed that since her husband really wanted a child, she was willing to accompany her husband to go through the procedures at the relevant institutions, hoping that she could know the whole process. She is willing to pretend to be pregnant for ten months and not go out until the child is born, so that the identity of this child is justified in the eyes of outsiders.

The mother expressed her grievances to Xu Shuqing: she didn't expect that she was obviously willing to cooperate and sacrifice to such an extent, but her husband still chose to deceive her and give birth to the child.

She then confided in her deeper suspicions: maybe her husband did not go to surrogacy, but gave birth to a child with a lover. She can forgive her husband for hiding the surrogate, but she can never forgive cheating.

Surprised, Xu Shuqing couldn't understand why the mother, as a woman, could accept "surrogacy". When she first learned that her father was trying to give birth to a child by surrogacy, Xu Shuqing was ashamed of her father. She told her friends that she couldn't imagine that as a staunch feminist, something like this would happen at home.

During her college years, Xu Shuqing re-understood the social significance behind the technology of "surrogacy" when she studied feminism, and realized that it was the exploitation of women. She explained to her mother that once surrogacy is legal, there will be many women involved in it, actively or passively supporting the family in a way that seriously harms the body. The mother understood what Xu Shuqing meant, but said that she could not reach her daughter's ideological realm.

More than a year after the divorce procedures were completed, Xu Shuqing's father and mother have been pulling on remarriage.

The father wants to remarry, and the mother is obsessed with seeing the surrogacy formalities to confirm that the ex-husband was a real surrogate and not cheating, and then considers forgiveness. Xu Shuqing's father has been silent about this, and has not shown the relevant agreements and documents to his ex-wife. In April 2023, the mother introduced one of Xu Shuqing's sisters and brother-in-law to her father for surrogacy consultation. Xu Shuqing guessed that part of the mother's doing this was to verify whether the father really had a way to surrogate. In the end, the matter was also settled.

The pull continues until 2024. Mother told Xu Shuqing that until now, she still feels disgusted when she sees Xu Shuqing's father.

After the divorce, Xu Shuqing's parents have been maintaining superficial harmony in front of outsiders, hiding conflicts and divorce. My father still went to my grandparents' house from time to time to deliver some food and snacks. However, he always hurriedly put his things down and left, so his grandfather saw the clues. Mother didn't want Xu Shuqing's grandparents to worry, but she told the truth under questioning. The old man felt sorry for his daughter and supported her divorce.

At the parents' party, relatives would reassure her mother, but several cousins would also say that they understood Xu Shuqing's father's approach. A cousin persuaded Xu Shuqing to forgive his father, saying that he felt that his father was not bad, and what he did was not so excessive. There is also a cousin who analyzes his mother, and with the age of his mother, it will be difficult to find a suitable partner if he goes on a blind date to get married.

After the party ended, Xu Shuqing hurriedly told her mother, don't believe those words. She told her mother that she didn't have to have a man in her life, and wanted to encourage her mother to get out of the county town that made her miserable and go to a bigger city to live a new life. But her mother revealed to her her deep fear of loneliness.

Xu Shuqing guessed that out of disgust with her father, her mother should not easily remarry in the short term. But I don't think it's possible to say for sure, maybe my mother will be unable to resist loneliness in the end, and she will still forgive my father. In the final analysis, Xu Shuqing is a person who watches the fire from the other side, and there is no way to make decisions for her mother.

She has her own problems to face. She has become cracked and mottled in the small home that was once complete and harmonious. Her parents used to support her, but now she realizes that she may not have the retreat of "going home" and needs to rely more on herself.

In the future, there are many troubles, such as the father's child who is growing up, and I don't know if he will have a connection with her mother and her. But she didn't want to think about these things at the moment, she didn't want to advance her anxiety.

- END -

Written by Tong Chang

Editor|Wen Lihong

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