Aggregated News
Kyla Simpson pulled up to the St. Johns County, Fla., sheriff’s office in a black SUV in June with two toddlers in the back seat. She had given birth to them and raised them.
“Mommy loves you, OK?” she said, according to a video of the scene posted to social media.
Then, surrounded by deputies, she handed them over to a lawyer for their father, who lives in China. He had paid more than $300,000 to bring them into the world and had never met them.
“I’m gonna kiss my kids a few more times,” Simpson told a deputy, before the father’s attorney buckled the crying boys, now 20 months old, into car seats.
They had been born triplets; a third boy had died at nine months old. In July, Florida’s attorney general intervened in litigation between Simpson and the father, persuading a state judge to bar the children from leaving the U.S. while a custody suit proceeds.
The case touches nearly every fault line of the sprawling and largely unregulated multibillion-dollar American surrogacy industry, where it is increasingly...