For figure skater Alysa Liu, the Milan Olympics meant something special: her return to the world’s greatest stage after her retirement four years ago at the age of 16. And return Liu did, winning two gold medals and breaking the United States’ drought in women’s figure skating. 

But why did she retire in the first place? 

Alysa Liu’s father, Arthur Liu, is a Chinese immigrant turned single father. Arthur moved to the U.S. at age 25 before starting a legal practice. At age 40, still single, he decided it was time to start his family — so he obtained not one, not two, but five children via surrogacy (a process that can cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars). 

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Arthur introduced Alysa to figure skating when she was five. When he saw her natural talent, he pushed her, pouring thousands of dollars into her training — pushing so hard that Alysa described figure skating in an interview as “basically his business,” not her own. 

After spending over a decade in what she described as an “abnormal childhood,” Alysa finally decided to retire in 2022 after COVID-19 offered her the chance to experience life without skating. She didn’t consult her father. 

In 2024, after two years of soul-searching, Alysa decided to return — but this time with one condition: She, not her father, would run her training and career. 

Alysa Liu’s story isn’t that far out of the ordinary. And, in the end, she had her happy ending. But her life hints at something the mainstream media tends to ignore: the dark underbelly of the surrogacy industry. 

Inherent in surrogacy is the idea that children are commodities, items to be bought and sold. That commodification breeds, at best, a tendency to value children for what they can do or offer, not for who they are.  

Alysa Liu experienced a mild form of that. But her story pales in comparison to those of many other children born via surrogacy. In one instance, a Chinese billionaire planned to father at least 20 children — boys, not girls — who he would raise to take over his business empire. Meanwhile, a different Chinese billionaire bought dozens of eggs from U.S. models in the hopes of fathering beautiful daughters he could marry off to grow his empire. 

Those stories highlight another, even darker problem with both IVF and surrogacy: a “made-to-order” mindset that seeks to build the perfect child — disregarding any child the parents consider “less than.”

Paris Hilton, for example, says she and her husband have frozen 20 male embryos — preborn babies — because they want a daughter. Meanwhile, countless stories abound of prospective parents urging surrogates to abort children with birth defects (or even the wrong gender). In one instance, prospective parents kept one twin while abandoning the other because that child had Down syndrome. 

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Yet as if all that weren’t enough, surrogacy lends itself to neglect, abuse, and trafficking. In the U.S., surrogacy is almost completely unregulated, making it the perfect opportunity for abusers to acquire children completely within the confines of the law. 

Last summer, 21 surrogacy-born children were discovered in an L.A. mansion, all showing signs of abuse. The government had no idea they were there. The children were put in foster care — yet somehow, the parents were still able to order yet another child. 

In one of the cases above, that of the Chinese billionaire hoping to father up to 100 children, he had already succeeded in fathering at least 8 children by surrogacy — mostly raised by nannies — before the state even raised an eyebrow. If children are a commodity, an idea inherent in both IVF and surrogacy, then none of the above is wrong. If you’re paying for a product, then you should be able to pick what you want the product to look like — and what you do with the product. But of course, children aren’t items to be traded; they’re unique individuals possessing infinite worth.  

Surrogacy tramples that worth, turning what should be protected into an item to be used, abused, and discarded at the whims of others. It needs to go — and those who exploit it to prey on the vulnerable need to be punished to the fullest extent of the law. 

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