Hong Kong Court Grants Parenting Rights in Mainland Surrogacy Case

A Hong Kong court has granted a local married couple a parental order for two boys born following a verbal surrogacy agreement in mainland China, ruling that the applicants were merely ignorant that the arrangement was illegal. The High Court granted parenting rights to the couple last Tuesday. According to court documents, the husband, aged 61, and wife, aged 59, commissioned two surrogates via an agent in Shenzhen in July 2023 to each carry embryos created using his sperm and donors’ eggs. The boys were born in the mainland city by caesarean sections the following year. They turned to the court after failing to secure identification documents for the boys to move to Hong Kong from Shenzhen. They were denied the documents because the wife was not the birth mother, although the couple were both Hong Kong permanent residents. She was also unable to have her status as a mother legally recognised on the mainland after a court in Shenzhen refused to accept her case, as it involved commercial surrogacy.