In recent weeks, fertility experts have claimed that Silvia and Guojun would have been unable to carry out their plans had they worked with industry professionals. This is not quite true. I discovered that, in addition to the ersatz firm they operated out of their house, the couple made occasional use of independent agencies. They also enlisted the services of blue-chip fertility clinics and pricey fertility lawyers.
One reason there are so few rules around surrogacy is that the practice is viewed primarily as a fertility treatment, and such treatments tend to be tailored to the parents’ desires. The laws regulating adoption, by contrast, are designed around protecting a child who has already been conceived. In the wake of the Arcadia case, several efforts have emerged to redress this asymmetry. In May, a group of fertility lawyers launched SurroStudy, a screening service that employs licensed social workers who can perform home studies and background checks on all of the parties in a surrogacy arrangement, including the intended parents. “None of us wants to be caught up in a scandal because we find out, ‘Oh, God, it’s their twenty-fifth kid,’ ” Rich Geisler, a fertility lawyer and the co-founder of SurroStudy, told me.
Around the same time, a group of surrogates, not connected to Silvia and Guojun, launched an advocacy organization called the National Surrogate Alliance. Kayde Mason, a two-time surrogate, told me that she’d created the group after noticing there were professional organizations representing the interests of fertility doctors, lawyers, and agency owners, but none for the women putting their bodies on the line. “Who were the surrogates in your story supposed to reach out to?” Mason asked me. “There should’ve been someone ready to step in and provide support and there wasn’t. There has to be somewhere for surrogates to go that’s bigger than just the agency they signed up with.”
The women who had carried for Silvia and Guojun told me that they would have never agreed to work for the parents if they’d been informed of the scale of their family. In fact, in August, five of them sued the couple for fraud and sexual battery, among other claims. Jamie Majerus, their lawyer, told me that she hadn’t been able to find any precedent for the complaint’s unusual legal argument about reproductive exploitation. “You can’t have consent when you sign a contract based on misrepresentations,” Majerus said. “Each plaintiff in this case surrendered her body to the couple’s enterprise, and she did so only because they deceived her into believing she was helping a single loving family conceive this one child.”
Last Friday, Silvia and Guojun again appeared in court, where their lawyers argued that both defendants should be released on their own recognizance—that is, without posting bail. Mitchell Krems said that Guojun’s grave medical issues—which included a “hole in his chest,” mucus coming out of the back of his head, and diabetes—were not being adequately addressed in jail. Guojun had shuffled out of the house the morning of his arrest (bragging, according to one law-enforcement source, about his unproven connections to President Donald Trump), but Krems said that his client was now unable to walk. He added that Guojun would have difficulty accessing his bank accounts because he didn’t remember his passwords.
