Children cannot speak for themselves. That is why adults must.
On February 9, 2026, The New Yorker published an exposé of Kayla Elliot, a surrogate, and the Xuan family. Elliot, a woman promised she would remain part of the child’s life after birth, was allegedly shut out entirely once she had delivered. Deceived from the moment she signed her surrogacy contract. But the scandal points to something harsher. Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang ran an unlicensed agency, a front for themselves, to recruit gestational carriers across the country. They paid a $45,000 base rate and contracted out children with no state oversight. Their 10,000 square-foot Arcadia (LA county) mansion functioned as a corporate headquarters, with security cameras monitoring the 23 children—the majority under 3 years-old. Their goal was explicit: Guojun spoke of building a “dynasty” and increasing the odds that one of his children might someday become U.S. president. When child protective services eventually intervened, medical exams revealed pneumonia, ear infections, untreated asthma, and several toddlers exhibiting food-hoarding behaviors.
The implied cure, the article suggests, is better regulation. But by framing the problem as one of bad actors and regulatory loopholes, this story and others like it mistake symptoms for the disease. The question is not whether the surrogacy industry is well-run. It is whether such a market should exist at all.
Every commercial surrogacy agreement follows this pattern where an adult specifies a desired outcome, a price is attached, and a child is brought into the world to satisfy that transaction. The Xuan case makes visible what contract logic always contains. The child is not the end the arrangement is ordered toward loving. He is what the contract is ordered toward producing. The child’s dignity is not incidental to the deal. It is what the deal costs.
But what is at issue is deeper than money or contract. Before a child is conceived via some surrogacy agreement, it has already been decided that the woman who carries her will surrender her. The maternal relationship is intentionally split between biological, gestational, and social components and distributed by agreement.
It is unjust, I argue, to bring a child into the world by means that deliberately deprive her of what every child is owed by the very fact of her existence: an origin that belongs to her, not one pre-parceled by contract. This is not a sentimental claim but one about dignity, about whether a child enters the world as a person to be loved or a product to be delivered.
This is what sets surrogacy apart from other arrangements involving children. Adoption begins with a child who is already here and already suffering a loss. The financial and legal mechanisms of adoption exist for the purpose of remedying that loss by finding that child a family suitable for her. The contract serves the child. Commercial surrogacy reverses this dignity-preserving order. In such a contract, we do not begin with a child in need but with an adult desire and the child is brought
into existence specifically to satisfy it, severing her ingregrated maternal relationship in the very act of creating her.
I can sympathize with those who defend surrogacy as a triumph of individual autonomy, and the case for it is not trivial. For most of human history, infertility was simply a grief to be endured. The desire for children is among the most elemental of biological imperatives, one that the oldest human traditions have recognized and honored. That surrogacy can answer real anguish, while also offering financial opportunity to the women who carry those children, is not nothing. These are serious goods, seriously felt.
But the conversation cannot end with the consenting adults in the room. Good intentions cannot sanitize a framework that treats a child’s origin as a divisible and transferable good. The fundamental moral line is not simply that “there are, in a civilized society, some things that money cannot buy,” as the New Jersey Supreme Court warned in the Baby M. case. It is about whether adults have the right to bring a child into the world under a contract that predetermines the severing of his most fundamental human relationship. The conversation must shift from policing the market’s edges to asking whether any surrogacy arrangement, however well-regulated and however well-intentioned, can be squared with the dignity of the child at its center—a child who was never asked and could not have been.