Surrogate mothers who gave birth to children for an Arcadia couple are looking for answers after the pair were recently accused of neglect and 21 children and babies were removed from their home.
On May 7, Arcadia police officers responded to a local hospital for a report of a 2-month-old child with significant head trauma, according to Arcadia Police Lt. Kollin Cieadlo. Officers confirmed that the child had apparently been shaken or dropped, or had gone through a traumatic incident.
Detectives responded to a home in the 600 block of West Camino Real Avenue and discovered there were 15 other children inside the residence, Cieadlo said. Police wrote a search warrant for surveillance footage, hard drives and phone records from the home and identified the nanny, 56-year-old Chunmei Li, as the suspect in the child abuse. Officials said they also corroborated that the parents, 65-year-old Guojun Xuan and 38-year-old Silvia Zhang, allegedly knew the child was injured and did nothing for two days.
Two days later, Zhang and Xuan were arrested on suspicion of felony child endangerment and neglect and their children were taken into protective custody, police said. The nanny, Li, wasn’t at the home and is still outstanding. Six other children who were temporarily away from the home at the time have since been taken into protective custody by the Department of Children and Family Services and placed into foster care.
The 21 children, some of whom were born through surrogacy, range from 2 months to 13 years old, with the majority of them between 1 to 3 years old, Cieadlo said. The case was deferred by the district attorney for further investigation and the couple was released without any charges being filed.
In an interview with Bioethics and Culture, a networking group that focuses on ethics in biotechnology, Kayla Elliott said she met the couple when she was done having children of her own but wanted to help others grow their family. The Texas mother of four said she first posted on Facebook about wanting to become a surrogate and that Mark Agency, the surrogacy company she used, reached out to her through social media. She said that she knows now that that should’ve been the first red flag.
Elliott told Bioethics and Culture she agreed to become a surrogate for a Chinese couple, and was told the embryo was conceived with the father’s sperm and a donor egg. She underwent an embryo transfer at Western Fertility Institute in Encino last year. During the transfer, Elliott was supposed to meet the couple in-person for the first time, she said. Only the father was present and Elliott was told the mother had a stomach bug and didn’t want to get her sick, she said.
“Now we know that that was the same situation told to many other women that also used them,” she told the interviewer. “It was some type of a lie.”
When Elliott was 17 weeks pregnant, she told the group, she was scrolling Facebook and looking through surrogacy agency reviews. Elliott saw the Mark Agency reviews and saw they were negative.
Through Facebook comments, Elliott claims she found two other women who were carrying babies for the same Chinese couple that she was. Elliott immediately reached out to her lawyer, who contacted the surrogacy agency’s lawyer. Elliott was told that because the father was much older than the mother, they wanted to have as many children as they could before he got too old.
Elliott told the group that through her pregnancy, she had very minimal contact with the intended parents, which was another red flag. Elliott induced labor and still didn’t heard from the intended mother. Eventually, she heard from the surrogate agency, which asked if there was a closer airport to the hospital because the mother was having a difficult time getting there.
The intended mother eventually arrived six hours after the baby was born.
The woman handed Elliott $2,000 and thanked her for giving birth.
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