FOUNTAIN VALLEY, California — Inside a three-story pastel mansion in this quiet suburb south of Los Angeles, Auntie Wang cradles a 2-week-old baby girl named Echo.
“The more time you spend with her, the more she is attached to you,” says Auntie Wang, who moved to the United States seven years ago from China. “You hold her, play with her, engage with her and look, she responds to you.”
The 58-year-old clucks and coos at the baby in obvious delight. But for all the affection, she is not the baby’s mother or even a relative. She is a hired nanny whose job is to care for Echo and other babies like her born through surrogacy — where a woman carries and gives birth to a baby for another couple or individual.
Auntie Wang does not want to share her full name because of the sensitivity and legal issues around surrogacy in her home country.
The agency she works for, called Fat Daddy, specializes in these services for clients in China — where providing surrogacy is effectively prohibited.
The company is one part of a well-established industry centered in California that also includes the controversial service of bringing Chinese mothers to the U.S. to give birth to their children, known as “birth tourism.”
But for nearly three years, the whole industry has been upended by the coronavirus pandemic and China’s travel restrictions, which have been among the tightest in the world. In 2020, Beijing completely shut the country’s border to contain COVID-19 and has never fully reopened them.
That has meant Chinese parents cannot fly to the U.S. to meet or vet their surrogate in person. Instead, clients have had to send their reproductive samples — eggs, sperm or both — via special delivery to the U.S. so the surrogacy can take place.
China’s “zero-COVID” policies and recent…