Babies aren’t commodities. Ban surrogacy after California abuse case

Surrogacy should be banned¹, as @BillboardChris called for in an Oct. 31 post responding to a California child-abuse case. Sky News’s Oct. 31 post said the charged California couple had 27 children, most born via surrogates².

27 children

The children’s treatment is at the center of the criminal case: Prosecutors allege that nannies beat them daily while the couple watched through surveillance cameras and laughed³.

Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang face counts of child abuse, conspiracy to commit child abuse, accessory after the fact and dissuading a witness, the Associated Press reported, citing Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman. The couple pleaded not guilty and denied the allegations. Their attorney, Mitchell Krems, blamed the nannies and said Xuan intervened: “He fired the nanny, excised her from the house.”³

The Associated Press reported prosecutors’ allegation that the couple had 21 children through surrogacy³. Those descriptions are not a direct count-to-count contradiction: one gives a number attributed to surrogacy, while the other gives the total number of children and says only that most were born that way. That distinction matters to a family-facing account of the case: the overall number of children cannot be reported as the number born through surrogacy.

Judge Kerry White set bail at $20 million each, with home detention and an order barring visits to their children. The district attorney’s office said a federal investigation was ongoing³. The children’s welfare is the stake in the case—and in @BillboardChris’s call to ban surrogacy.

Sources

1. @BillboardChris on X, 2026-10-31: This Chinese couple acquired 27 children via surrogacy. Obscene. Babies aren’t commodities. This practice needs to be banned. https://x.com/SkyNews/status/2116443497465090160/video/1, 2026-10-31
2. Post
3. California couple arrested on child abuse charges in horrifying surrogacy probe