Chinese ‘Rent-a-Womb’ Industry Using American Surrogates Could Be Exploited by CCP: Expert

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The Chinese “rent-a-womb” industry using American surrogates could be exploited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to The Heritage Foundation researcher Emma Waters.

Commercial surrogacy refers to people who hire another woman to gestate and birth their child for a fee.

According to the expert, according to U.S. birthright citizenship law, any child born in the United States via an American surrogate—even if the child is 100 percent genetically Chinese and its parents are Chinese nationals—will gain the full rights of U.S. citizenship when he or she turns 21 years old.

The child’s parents then become eligible to apply for a Green Card for permanent residency in the United States. In Waters’ opinion, this is a far easier route to gain citizenship than the traditional application process.

“There’s a lot of concerns about how the CCP may use and abuse that connection that they have,” Waters said during an interview with NTD, the sister outlet of The Epoch Times.

“Whether or not the CCP is directly encouraging or condoning this, we have no way of knowing,“ she said. ”But we do know that it puts these children and their parents very close to U.S. interests and access to education, to insurance. And to ... all the benefits of being a U.S. citizen.”

Huge Money-Making Business

According to the researcher, the reproductive industry has seen an uptick trend as it is a “huge money-making business.”

“Commercial surrogacy contracts, especially international ones, can cost upwards of $200,000 to $300,000 per child. And that’s calculating the cost of in vitro fertilization treatments, of actually paying the surrogate herself, of working with clinics, as well as any of the travel fees when it comes to visiting the United States or bringing the child home. So this really does self-select for a special wealthy class of Chinese nationals,” said Waters.

“The reproductive industry is making millions if not billions of dollars annually in the United States, not to mention beyond that.”

The business is also lucrative for Chinese clinics in the United States as well, she noted.

“When it comes to connecting Chinese interests, there’s a lot of money here with Chinese citizens actually working at some of these fertility clinics in the United States. So they either have employment ties, residency ties, or education ties to China.”

And thus, she said, “It’s a huge interest on the state level to keep encouraging these contracts, but also when it comes to connecting Chinese interests.”

No Tracking System

Waters further raised concern about the lack of a federal tracking system to identify those parents and children.

“We actually have no federal regulation that governs commercial surrogacy contracts domestic or internationally,” she noted.

“There’s a lot of money and a lot of focus on keeping this under the radar.”

The expert cited the Agricultural Investment Disclosure Act stipulating that foreign land ownership must be reported.

She urged for similar legislation addressing surrogacy issues.

“So in the same way that we have the Agricultural Investment Disclosure Act in the United States that ensures that any foreign nationals who buy farmland in the United States must be reported, we should have a similar law in place ensuring that any foreign nationals who are purchasing surrogates and bearing children in the United States through them are going into a federal tracking system. So if anything, at least we know who these parents and their children are, because right now we have no way of knowing who they are,” Waters said.