Shadowing Practice: Chinese Billionaire Used American Surrogates to Have 300 Kids?? How Is This Legal? - Learn English Speaking with Video

Did you guys see this wild story?

A Chinese billionaire reportedly has somewhere between 100 and 300 children,

which he apparently had with American surrogates.

Watch this.

We're about to meet up with a surrogate who is currently pregnant with a baby for a Chinese billionaire.

He allegedly has at least 100 children via surrogate.

And we actually broke that news to her.

She was shocked to find out that she may be having a baby that becomes one of dozens of children.

I feel blindsided.

I feel misled.

Now, it's really hard to get a handle on the number of kids this man actually has, but he has admitted to having at least 12.

In a note to our surrogate, he said that he wants 13 kids.

He's in a custody battle with an ex-girlfriend over 11 children, and that same ex-girlfriend claims he may have as many as 300 kids.

Now, he also just this week posted on Weibo a photo of all of these children,

and he doesn't seem to be denying these allegations that he may have at least 100 kids.

In fact, in a statement, he said that having more children brings more blessings and that he is striving for the development of the Chinese nation.

It feels like he's like creating an army.

That's crazy.

Did you count how many kids are in this picture?

I don't understand what the motive is.

I just know that it's going to be hard for the child.

The surrogate has learned that he is also working with more than 20 other surrogates right now.

She told us that she's starting to feel like she's part of a baby factory.

Now, for those of you who've been following, this investigation began with us looking into this couple in Arcadia,

California, after more than 20 kids born to surrogate were taken away from them.

We started to wonder why they were having so many children.

The more we've looked into this, we've discovered that there are several cases of couples who are using multiple surrogates, often within a very short time span,

to build these big families.

And the more we dig into it, the more questions we have about what is going on here.

Why are these people having so many children?

When they matched you, did they tell you anything about their family?

It was along the lines of just a single father looking to have a big family.

When you heard that he wanted a big family, what did you think that meant?

I was picturing Sound of Music.

It was a really emotional interview.

She is so conflicted about this child.

She is 12 weeks pregnant.

She recognizes that she made a decision to get pregnant, even though she had learned some information about the intended parent,

this Chinese billionaire, and this supposed brood of children.

She's a single mom.

A big part of why she's doing this is to make their lives better, to earn some money so that she can take good care of her child.

but she also went into this because she was hoping to help another family.

And now she really doesn't know what kind of family she's bringing this child into, and she's extremely concerned.

It's just a really crappy thing to be a part of.

I mean, you don't even think that this could be legal.

Like, everyone, every step of the way, tells him yes and allows this and is,

like, creating these agreements, And then it's just up to the surrogate at that point who has half of the information.

Okay.

This is obviously calling into question surrogacy in general.

Should surrogacy be allowed?

That's the big question.

So to answer this, let's go back in time to the first surrogacy mentioned in recorded history.

And it's not in a fertility clinic brochure.

It's in the book of Genesis.

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Quote, now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children, but she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar, who she said to Abram,

the Lord has kept me from having children.

Go sleep with my slave.

Perhaps I can build a family through her.

Abram agreed to what Sarai said.

And then, so Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had born.

So it happens again, a generation later with Abraham's grandson, Jacob, two of Jacob's wives, Leah and Rachel, both used surrogates.

And Rachel says, here is Bila, my servant, sleep with her so that she may bear children for me.

And I too can build a family through her.

And when the child is born, she says, God has vindicated me.

He has listened to my plea and given me a son.

And she names him Dan.

Leah does the same with her servant Zilpah.

And when the boy is born, she says, what good fortune.

And she names him Gad.

Now notice the pattern in every one of those accounts.

The woman carrying the child is a servant,

a slave, someone with no real power to say no. And for most of recorded history after that.

Surrogacy stayed rare and it stayed a thing the elites did.

But that started to change in the 1980s.

The floodgates opened with a woman known as Elizabeth Kane.

She was the first legally contracted compensated surrogate mother in the United States.

She was 37 years old, an Illinois housewife, a mother of three.

She saw a classified might add placed by an infertile couple in Kentucky.

And she became by her own description, she says, obsessed with the idea of helping childless couples.

So in November of 1980, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

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This is what's called traditional surrogacy, meaning she was inseminated and she was the child's biological mother.

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That baby was genetically hers.

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She was paid $10,000, which is about $40,000 in today's money.

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And then she handed him over.

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And after she came home, she fell into a suicidal depression.

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She said part of her had already died.

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Now, I want you to hear that in her own words, because she wrote her son a letter, quote, I saw you for the first time this morning.

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Tonight, I saw you being held in the arms of your father, protective, loving, disbelieving, you are really his flesh.

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I was struck by your beauty the moment I saw you.

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Do not be offended, Justin.

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As a young man, you will be handsome, but as a newborn child, you are beautiful.

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You are purity in its highest form.

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You slept peacefully this morning, unaware of my presence, while I marveled at the smoothness of your skin and the perfection of your coloring like mine.

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I ache to pick you up and hold your tiny soft body against mine, if only for a precious moment,

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just to be able to cherish forever the way you would feel outside me.

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But I could not.

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I knew you would melt into me and snuggle your velvet cheek against my neck.

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I would have listened to your small sucking noises while you sought nourishment with your eyes You were closed, rooting for the breast milk.

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You were forbidden.

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If I would have held you, Justin, I would have not put you back ever.

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But you do not belong to me.

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I could not touch you with my hands.

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I had to be satisfied to embrace you with my heart.

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I want you to remember the way you looked forever.

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I want to remember the way you looked forever.

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I have lost a friend in you, Justin.

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A part of me has died.

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I will grieve alone for who would understand the loss of you.

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Yet I am reminded, even though your leaving me feels like a death, that you are a gift of life.

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You are healthy and alive and have simply been placed from my womb into the arms of another woman.

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Just remembering her elation when she held you after birth still swells my heart with pride.

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I love you, Justin.

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If we could have been together, I would have held you tightly and whispered those words into your tiny ear.

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They would have been burned into your subconscious forever, so you would always remember you were not given away,

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but simply relinquished to another woman who needed you more than I.

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You will always be my son, Justin.

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I am part of your soul.

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Pictures of your grandparents are in my photo album.

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Even though I have to share you with another, you will always be inside my heart.

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sleep peacefully now baby boy make them very happy but never forget that your mother loves you

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goodbye my darling son I can no longer be part of

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your precious life with all my love your first mother she

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signed it your first mother it tore her family apart actually her children were bullied her marriage suffered

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and the woman who had been held up as proof that this could work became one of the practice's most forceful opponents.

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She later submitted an affidavit in another high-profile case writing that

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surrogate motherhood should be banned nationwide and that the practice caused unexpected emotional damage to surrogate mothers and their families.

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Her words, quote, Surrogate parenthood is merely reproductive prostitution.

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It's still affluent men utilizing a disadvantaged woman's body.

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She also said this, quote, We have come face to face with the fact

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that wealthy men are taking advantage of women from lower middle class income families.

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The baby brokers and judges are well aware of the financial status of women being hired as breeders.

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Smug in the fact

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that few will have the financial means to engage in long legal battles to regain custody of their own children.

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This is reproductive prostitution.

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Baby brokers, breeders.

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That is the language of the first American woman who ever did this legally. So here's the thing.

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Cases like Keynes, traditional surrogacy, where the woman carrying the baby is also the biological mother,

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are far less common today because the industry found a way around the problem, and it's called gestational surrogacy.

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An embryo is created in a lab and transferred into the carrier

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so the woman carrying the pregnancy has no genetic relationship to the baby at all.

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Today, somewhere between 80% and 95% of surrogacies are gestational.

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Although when this matters, we don't really have solid data.

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The strongest nationwide tracking in this country is for IVF, which captures gestational carrier cycles.

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But traditional surrogacy often uses artificial insemination instead of IVF.

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So it falls outside of the CDC's assisted reproduction reporting entirely.

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So I don't really know.

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Nobody can give a full reliable nation number for traditional surrogacy where a woman gives up her own child.

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We're guessing.

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But let's go through the history of surrogacy.

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beyond the book of Genesis.

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In the early 1980s, nearly all surrogacy was traditional because IVF was new, unreliable, and not widely available.

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The surrogate was inseminated and she was the baby's genetic mother.

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But then there was baby M.

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In 1985, Mary Beth Whitehead agreed to be artificially inseminated with the sperm of William Stern, whose wife Elizabeth could not carry a pregnancy.

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And their daughter, Melissa Elizabeth Stern, the child the country came to know as baby was born on March 27th, 1986.

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And after the birth, Whitehead became attached to her baby and did not want to give her up.

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In 1987, a trial judge treated the agreement as valid, and he gave William Stern sole custody and ordered Whitehead's parental rights terminated

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and cleared the way for Elizabeth Stern to adopt the child.

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Now, think about what that meant.

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A court enforced an agreement signed before the child was even conceived, requiring a baby's biological mother,

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actual mother, to surrender her child in exchange for payment.

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Then, on February of 1988, the New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously threw the contract out,

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and it said a state cannot treat a paid contract as a shortcut around the normal protections

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that govern adoption and the termination of a parent's rights.

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But interestingly, that kind of courtroom battle is actually rare, traditional surrogacy gets treated roughly like an adoption.

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I mean, the mother can back out, but actually it's kind of rare.

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Gestational surrogacy, however, does not get treated in the same way legally.

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It's looked at more like a rented womb.

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Gestational surrogacy is

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when a woman allows her body to be used by a couple with an implanted embryo

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that is not related to her at all.

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Okay.

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So both raise enormous ethical questions.

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Both have serious critics.

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In one version, the objection is you're selling a baby.

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And in the other, the objection is you're renting a womb.

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But in neither case does the woman, and this is an important point because it's relative to a case that's recent,

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neither case does the woman carrying the child become property herself.

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So no one can compel a medical treatment.

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No one can force a medical decision.

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No one can force an abortion, which we just watched play out recently.

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You might have heard about this, but a surrogate carrying a child for a couple in California was asked to terminate the pregnancy

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because the baby had hypoplastic left heart syndrome.

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Their right to abort was apparently in the contract.

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However, she refused.

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She left for Texas, had the baby there, and then she actually sought custody and conservatorship over the child.

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The court, however, gave her no rights over the child.

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And what's interesting about this story is she didn't need to run off to Texas at all.

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No one in any state, no matter how liberal the state, can compel anyone into an abortion.

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But let's keep looking at the history.

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Okay, so by the late 80s and into the early 90s, IVF got better and it became the practical alternative.

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Agencies and intended parents increasingly preferred gestational arrangements precisely

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because they cut the carrier's genetic relationship to the baby and with it all the legal complications that come with it.

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By the early 1990s, gestational arrangements were the majority in this country.

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And from 1993 onward, court rulings and state laws built a more predictable legal framework for gestational arrangements,

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which is what allowed surrogacy to go mainstream.

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And that's the story the industry tells as progress.

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And in a narrow legal sense, it is.

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The lawsuits got rarer, But the moral objection was an answer.

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Now, if this practice is as safe and as joyful as marketing says, you would expect a mountain of independent research on how it affects the women who do it.

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But there isn't one.

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There is remarkably little.

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Instead, what you get are news articles boasting clean results, citing surveys conducted by surrogacy companies themselves.

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And even those industry-run numbers don't say what people think.

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One of them reports that 75% of surrogates didn't have postpartum depression or emotional challenges after giving birth.

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Okay, well, that means 25% did.

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So let's talk about what this is now, because it's not a niche medical service anymore.

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It's an industry, and it's about to explode.

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Market research and consulting firm at SNS Insider puts the current market at nearly $25 billion as of last year.

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And get this, it's projected to grow to nearly $203 billion by 2035.

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That's less than 10 years.

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That boom is being fueled by a handful of trends.

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That's rising infertility and delayed parenthood, growing demand from LGBTQ, and of course,

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single parents as well, fertility tourism, also better IVF success rates.

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And that's driven by artificial intelligence and genetic testing.

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Employers are also funding fertility benefits.

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Those are expanding.

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And the growing acceptance of cryptocurrency is also helping pay for the procedures.

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So North America has the largest share of the market at 35 to 40 percent coming from North America.

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Europe has about 28 percent of the market.

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Asia Pacific, 22 percent of the market.

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The rest of the world, like Latin America, Middle East, Africa, they're only about 5%.

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But market share doesn't tell you everything.

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It tracks where the spending comes from, not the countries where the money is being spent.

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Countries with a complete ban on surrogacy include France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, China,

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Serbia, Turkey, Iceland, Switzerland, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

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Countries that ban commercial surrogacy but allow for altruistic arrangements, which means, you know, maybe your sister will have a baby for you or a friend will have a baby for you,

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but no payment is accepted.

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That includes the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland, Belgium and Brazil.

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Though it's not uncommon for surrogacies to be less altruistic than they claim.

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You know, they are on paper, but there's loopholes and maybe there's something happening there under the table.

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Now, globally, commercial surrogacy makes up 84% of the market.

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Altruistic makes up just 16%.

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And the United States, surrogacy is not federally regulated here at all.

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Now, let me tell you about what happens when it goes wrong.

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Okay.

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In San Diego, attorneys Teresa Erickson and Hilary Neiman, along with Carla Chambers, pleaded guilty in a federal fraud scheme built around women who

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had been implanted with embryos before any legitimate intended parents had signed on.

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Prosecutors said the group waited until the pregnancies passed the first trimester,

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then marketed those pregnancies to prospective parents for $100,000 to $150,000 each.

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The women carrying the pregnancies were told there were already intended parents that they were surrogates.

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The prospective parents were told a normal surrogacy match had been arranged.

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But in effect, the defendants created a supply of pregnancies, then sold access to the resulting babies.

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Now, this is not metaphorical baby selling.

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Federal prosecutors described an actual scheme to create an inventory of babies for sale.

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They implanted women first, waited until the pregnancies were viable, then marketed the babies for up to $150,000 a piece.

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Then there's Italy.

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an Italian couple used a gestational surrogacy arrangement in Russia, came home to Italy with a baby they believed was genetically theirs,

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genetically actually related to the father.

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However, DNA testing showed neither intended parent had any biological connection to the child at all.

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So Italian authorities refused to recognize the foreign birth record, and when the child was about nine months old, they removed him from the couple and placed him under guardianship.

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So basically, a baby was removed from the only parents he had ever known at nine months old

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because DNA showed neither purchaser was actually related to him.

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And they have to do that to protect people actually buying babies on a black market.

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Then there's baby Manji.

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In 2008, a Japanese couple commissioned a pregnancy through a gestational carrier in India.

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Before the child was born, the couple divorced.

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The intended mother, who was not genetically related to the child, reportedly no longer wanted the baby.

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The infant was born in India using the intended father's sperm and a donor egg, and the surrogate had also no relationship genetically to the child.

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So India's Supreme Court eventually didn't really know what to do, but they enabled the child to leave the country on a travel document,

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and the intended father's mother took responsibility for her.

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But look at what the case exposed how fast a multi-country arrangement can leave a newborn with no obvious legal mother, no citizenship route, no passport,

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and no parentage status, the moment the adult's relationship just fell apart.

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The contract envisioned a child for a married couple.

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A divorce turned a newborn into an immigration crisis.

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The adults divorced before the birth, and the baby was left to find out which country, which family would even claim her, and no mother in sight.

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And then there's China.

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China China has long prohibited surrogacy and a large underground market has persisted anyway.

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When something goes wrong there, Chinese courts are left improvising case by case because there's no real law governing the situation.

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If the transaction is treated as invalid, who is responsible for a child who already exists?

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The surrogate, the genetic father, an intended couple who wants to back out now, the state, who even reports the illegal arrangement to begin with?

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What are the consequences?

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But most importantly, what happens to the kids?

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Now you might have a huge instinct at this point to just make the whole industry illegal.

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And I'll be honest with you, I'm certainly uneasy about the whole thing.

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But making something illegal often creates more problems than it solves.

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And in this particular industry, it's kids who get harmed the most.

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So I don't know what the answer is, but we're not done yet because we haven't gotten to Ukraine.

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Now, after the United States, Ukraine is the world's largest commercial surrogacy hub, though much of that industry has moved to the country of Georgia since the war.

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But in Ukraine today, you have surrogates giving birth in bomb shelters.

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I mean, look at this.

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Surrogates are giving birth in bomb shelters.

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Surrogate agencies there typically house surrogate mothers and agency provided apartments during the final months of their pregnancies.

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One Ukrainian agency, World Center Baby, went bankrupt, leaving foreign parents without their babies and Ukrainian surrogate mothers without their payments.

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I don't even know what to make of that.

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I mean, honestly, a company goes bankrupt.

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Parents, people have paid for babies.

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They made the babies with their eggs, with their embryos, with their sperm, whatever it is.

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And the company goes bankrupt and now babies are left stranded and the mothers, the surrogates don't get paid, but worse, the babies are stranded.

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I mean, we're listening to what's happening here.

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an interview with the bbc this year the owner of the ukrainian surrogacy agency said

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that 80 percent of the babies were left behind they were not collected by their biological parents 80 percent

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according to politico arguably arguably the world's most popular surrogacy agency is a company called Biotexcom,

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which runs what the outlet calls a baby factory.

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Their words, okay?

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Not even mine.

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And I would agree.

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I'd call it something worse than that.

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They've kept operating right through the war.

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By the company's own social media posts, babies have been protected in bunkers, armed soldiers escort newborns to and from the hospital,

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and foreigners make frantic journeys to Kiev to be united with their newborns.

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But while other people look at the war and saw tragedy, biotexcom saw opportunity they ran a marketing campaign called make babies not war

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and they began aggressively targeting refugees from eastern ukraine with social media ads

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and the atom about to show you is from earlier this year it's it's this is an ai generated ad

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but it's built to recruit struggling women

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and it features a woman forced to choose between buying wood to heat her stove or clothes for her children.

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Watch this.

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Surrogacy clinics don't see it this way.

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They say they offer women a way to earn money legally while helping others have a child.

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But this is part of a multi-billion dollar global business.

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Across websites and social media, clinics compete for clients.

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Their marketing can be direct, even aggressive.

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There are choices that are required from women's power.

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There is another choice, not less courageous.

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The choice to give a chance for pregnancy. Did you catch that?

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A Black Friday baby sale.

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Did you see this image?

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That's right.

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Right.

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Arguably the largest surrogacy company in the world.

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And now that industry is booming in Georgia.

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We're seeing some these kinds of stories all over again.

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21 kids, a couple from the country of Georgia.

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They had 21 surrogate children in 19 months.

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And around 100 women kept on what was described as an egg farm in Georgia, were fed hormones.

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They were lured there for a job offer to work as surrogates.

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It's insanity, guys.

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So let's go back to the story that brought us here.

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Okay, a Chinese billionaire reportedly using American surrogates to have dozens, maybe more than 100 children.

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Some accounts claim far more, 300.

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We don't need to settle every disputed number to understand why this story should make people stop and think.

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Because even if the number were 20, it would raise the same basic question.

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At what point does this stop being family building and start becoming something else?

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If a person has enough money, should they be able to commission a child after, you know, through a network of agencies, fertility clinics, lawyers, contracts, egg donors,

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surrogate mothers with no real limit and no one looking at the entire picture?

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Who's raising these kids?

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Who's paying for them?

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Who knows them?

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Who gets up with them at three in the morning?

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Who takes them to school?

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Who teaches them right from wrong?

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Who makes sure the child, you know, number 37 or 72 or 100 is not just materially provided for, but actually loved, protected, and seen as an individual human being?

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And what happens when things go wrong?

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What if the intended parent dies while multiple pregnancies are underway?

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What if he gets sick, loses his fortune, goes to prison, gets sanctioned, disappears, or simply changes his mind?

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What if a child is born disabled?

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What if there's a medical emergency?

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What if the surrogate decides she cannot go through with an abortion that the intended parents want?

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What if the child grows up and discovers they have 50, 100, maybe a bazillion half-siblings scattered across different states and countries?

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Who's responsible then?

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Because surrogacy divides parenthood into a lot of separate jobs.

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One person provides the egg, one person provides the sperm, another woman carries the baby, an agency makes the match, a clinic creates the embryo,

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lawyers draft contracts, a judge signs a parentage order, maybe a nanny or a staff member does the day-to-day care.

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And when something breaks, every person in that chain can point to someone else.

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The agency says, oh, we just made the match.

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The clinic said, oh, we just provided the medical services.

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The lawyer says, we just wrote the agreement.

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The intended parents say, I paid.

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And then the surrogate is left asking, what exactly did I agree to?

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Who is this child really going to?

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Who is going to protect them if nobody else does?

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That's the part of this debate that gets lost.

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This is not about saying infertile couples shouldn't have children.

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It's not about saying gay couples or single people shouldn't be parents.

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And it's certainly not about stigmatizing the children who are born through surrogacy.

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Those children deserve the same love, security, dignity, and legal protection as every other child.

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The question is whether we've created a commercial system that treats pregnancy like a service, parenthood like a transaction, and children like the final product.

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We regulate adoption because children are not merchandise.

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We regulate medicine because people's bodies are not merchandise.

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But with commercial surrogacy, we seem to assume that a contract, a payment schedule, and a lawyer's signature solve all the moral problems.

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But they don't.

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The billionaire story is disturbing, not because it's necessarily typical.

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It's definitely not typical.

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But it's disturbing because it shows us the outer edge of a system that doesn't seem to have a stopping point.

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If money can buy one pregnancy, why not 10?

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If it can buy 10, why not 50?

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And if it could buy 51 out of 100.

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At what point do we say this is no longer just a private choice?

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At what point do we say a society has an obligation to ask whether these children will actually be raised, whether women are truly given informed consent,

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and whether wealth should give someone the power to build a private empire of children?

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That is the question the story forces us to confront.

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Not whether these children matter, they do.

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The question is whether our system is built to protect them

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or whether it's built to serve the people wealthy enough to order them.

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But I keep coming back to something bigger than the number

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because maybe the real question isn't what happens when somebody has 10 children this way or 50 children or 100 children.

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Maybe the real question is whether even one child should be created this way.

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Strip away the glossy language, the journey, the matching, the intended parents, the gestational carrier.

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And what are we actually talking about?

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We're talking about women agreeing to become pregnant for somebody else, lawyers negotiating what happens to her body during that pregnancy,

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clinics creating embryos, agencies finding women to carry them, contracts setting payment schedules, and adults deciding in advance where the child goes the moment he or she is born.

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That can sound compassionate and in a lot of individual cases everyone involved genuinely believes it.

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But compassion doesn't make an arrangement morally simple.

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A woman can completely be willing to help someone else have a child.

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She can be proud of it.

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She can be paid well.

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She could have her own lawyer.

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She could sign every form in the world.

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But pregnancy is not renting out a spare room.

419

It's not doing a job and handing over a finished product.

420

Pregnancy changes a woman's body.

421

It carries risk.

422

She may end up on bed rest.

423

She may miscarry.

424

She may have a traumatic birth, an emergency sex section.

425

In rare cases, she can be permanently injured or die.

426

And what she's carrying is a human being.

427

I don't even really care about the woman to be quite honest with you.

428

I do because I know women are desperate and they're doing it for money.

429

But what I really care about is what she's carrying.

430

And that's a human being, not a package.

431

That's a baby, a child.

432

And a child is not a product.

433

A child is not an order that can be canceled, returned, upgraded, or rejected because the child is sick or disabled

434

or the wrong sex or one of twins or just more complicated than the adults expected.

435

And yet a commercial system creates exactly that kind of pressure.

436

There are contracts about prenatal testing, contracts about abortion, contracts about selective reduction, contracts about what happens if the baby has a disability,

437

contracts about whether she can travel, what she can eat, what doctor sees, can see the child or the woman, what procedures she can be expected to consider,

438

and when she hands the child over.

439

That should make all of us uncomfortable because the question isn't just whether a woman signs a contract,

440

the question is whether there are are some things human beings should not be asked to sign away.

441

Can you really contract away the emotional reality of pregnancy and birth, a baby, a freaking kid?

442

Can you really consent months in advance to surrendering a baby you have cared for for nine months?

443

Can money ever fully be separated from pressure, especially when the person being paid has far fewer resources than the person buying?

444

And can we honestly say there's no difference between helping someone

445

and building an industry that depends on women being willing to rent their bodies to wealthy strangers.

446

I'm not pretending these are easy questions.

447

There are people who desperately want children.

448

People born without a uterus, people facing infertility, cancer survivors, gay couples, single parents, their desire for a family is real, their grief is real, their hope is real,

449

and none of that deserves to be mocked.

450

But wanting a child, even deeply, even painfully, does not automatically create a right to somebody else's pregnancy or child.

451

That's where this gets hard.

452

We already accept that there are limits on what money should be able to buy.

453

Money can buy a house, an education, medical care.

454

Maybe it should or shouldn't.

455

We should argue that.

456

But can it buy access to another person's womb?

457

Can it buy an enforceable agreement that after birth the child will be transferred to the person who paid?

458

And if the answer is yes, we should at least be honest about what we're building.

459

We're building a market in reproductive labor, a system where wealthy people can be outsourced

460

they can outsource pregnancy to women who may need the money more than they do

461

contracts that reach into the most intimate medical decisions a woman will ever make

462

and children whose origins begin not with a family

463

but with the transaction some people hear all of that

464

and conclude regulate it better require independent lawyers require counseling ban

465

abortion clauses protect the surrogate's medical autonomy require escrow accounts screen

466

intended parents guarantee medical coverage make intended parents permanently responsible for

467

every child born no matter what those are serious ideas

468

and they'd be an improvement over what exists now

469

but others hear the same facts

470

and land somewhere else maybe there's no good contract enough to turn pregnancy

471

or a child into service without turning a woman's body into something for sale

472

or a child into something for sale maybe there's no amount of paperwork

473

that makes it normal to negotiate over a baby and their origin before the baby is born maybe that's the problem.

474

Maybe the problem is this is something we should not be regulating into acceptability in the first place.

475

And I'll tell you where I land, though I hold it with some humility because I said earlier that bans create their own victims, and I mean it.

476

The kids caught in the middle are always the ones who pay, but here it is.

477

I'm not okay with this.

478

A human life should begin not with a purchase order because if a child can be commissioned, if pregnancy can be bought,

479

And if money decides who gets to access another woman's body, then we should at least have the courage to ask whether we cross the line that no contract can fix.

480

Elizabeth Cain said at first, back in 1988, surrogate parenthood is merely reproductive prostitution.

481

It's still affluent men utilizing a disadvantaged woman's body.

482

The first woman who ever did this legally in America said that.

483

And 40 years later, it's a $25 billion industry on its way to $200 billion.

484

And before it gets to that point, we probably should have a serious discussion.

485

Thank you.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

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What is the Shadowing Technique?