A child was born in China four years after his parents died in a car accident, local media reported. His surrogate mother endured him. Shortly before the fatal road accident in 2013, a man and a woman froze several embryos in the hope of conceiving a child through artificial insemination.
After the car accident, the parents of the deceased couple long sought permission from the courts to use the embryos. A surrogate mother from Laos gave birth to the boy in December, Chinese media reported this week.
The Beijing News newspaper, the first to write about the case, described the legal trials that the grandparents of the newborn had to go through due to the lack of judicial precedent before they got the baby into the world.
During the car accident, the embryos were stored in a hospital in the Chinese city of Nanjing, frozen at a temperature of minus 196 degrees in a container with liquid nitrogen.
After lengthy legal proceedings, the court transferred the rights to use them to the four parents of the deceased couple. According to media reports, there have never been such cases of parents inheriting frozen embryos from their children.
But the tests of future grandparents did not end there. The embryos could only be removed from the Nanjing hospital on condition that they were accepted by another hospital. However, due to the legal ambiguity surrounding embryos in China, it was difficult to find another medical institution willing to take part in this.
In addition, surrogacy is prohibited in China. Relatives had to take the embryos abroad - this was the only way to solve the problem.
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As a result, the parents of the deceased couple decided to use the services of a surrogacy agency in Laos, where it is legal. But here, too, a problem arose - not a single airline agreed to take on board a thermos with liquid nitrogen. The priceless cargo had to be transported by car.
In Laos, embryos were planted in the uterus of a surrogate mother, and a boy was born in December 2017. He was named Tian Tian.
The problem is that Tian Tian was born not in Laos, but in China, where his surrogate mother came on a simple tourist visa. Since none of the boy's parents survived, all four of the child's grandparents had to undergo a DNA test to prove that this was their grandson, and that both of his parents were Chinese, which means that the child is a Chinese citizen.