Surrogate Fights for Custody After Chinese Client Vanished for 20 Months, One Triplet Baby Died

Kyla Simpson gave birth to triplet boys at UF Health Jacksonville on November 4, 2024. The intended father, a single man from China who commissioned the surrogacy, never showed up.

According to First Coast News, Simpson had signed a gestational surrogacy contract and a hospital birth plan dated October 31, 2024, giving her physical custody and decision-making authority in the father's absence. That paperwork turned out to matter a great deal.

The boys spent roughly two months in the neonatal intensive care unit. Simpson and her husband Lincoln brought them home in January 2025 and raised them, breastfeeding and caring for them, for months with no word from the man who'd hired her.

Simpson told First Coast News the intended father kept claiming he was working on a U.S. visa. At one point he asked her to help obtain the children's travel documents, and the two discussed the possibility of Simpson flying the babies to China herself.

Then, in a March 21, 2025 email, he said he'd send a friend and an agent to collect the children. Two men showed up at Simpson's home. She refused to hand the babies to strangers, telling him she'd only release them to him personally, to people he'd named as emergency contacts, or to an agency representative.

After that, communication broke down entirely. In August 2025, one of the triplets died from complications related to RSV. "I broke down crying over him," Simpson told First Coast News. "That was like my most bubbly baby."

She didn't hear from the intended father again until February 2026, nearly a year after the men showed up at her door and roughly 15 months after the birth. In May 2026, Simpson began legal proceedings to terminate his parental rights.

A court order has since placed the two surviving boys in foster care while the custody fight over their future plays out. Simpson is now fighting to get them back.

How the case became public

The story drew national attention after children's rights activist Katy Faust posted a summary on X, describing a single Chinese man who commissioned triplets, skipped the birth, sent "two sketchy guys in a black SUV" to collect the babies, then vanished for a year and a half. Faust called it a case study in "the global baby trade."

That framing is blunt, but the underlying facts track what First Coast News reported: an intended parent who paid for a surrogacy, didn't appear for the birth, made contradictory statements about visas and travel documents, then went dark for close to a year.

The legal backdrop

Florida's new law banning gestational surrogacy contracts involving citizens or residents of what the statute calls "foreign countries of concern," including China, took effect July 1, 2026. It came too late to prevent this case, since the contract was signed in October 2024.

Karen Persis, an assisted reproductive technology attorney not involved in the case, told First Coast News that intended parents from abroad typically handle all the paperwork themselves and are present for the birth. A parent simply never appearing is extremely rare.

This rarity matters in two directions. It means this case isn't proof of a widespread pattern of foreign intended parents abandoning surrogate-born children. But it also means the surrogacy industry's existing screening and contract safeguards, whatever they are, didn't catch a client who disappeared for a year and a half after commissioning triplets.

What's unresolved

No criminal charges have been filed against the intended father, and no source in this reporting identifies him by name or details his current whereabouts or legal status. It's unclear whether he faces any legal consequence beyond the termination-of-parental-rights proceeding Simpson initiated in May.

It's also unclear what happens to the surviving two boys next. Simpson wants custody. The state has them in foster care. A judge will have to decide whether the surrogacy contract's terms, the father's prolonged absence, and Simpson's nearly two years of caregiving are enough to award her permanent custody, or whether the children end up somewhere else entirely.

The case raises a narrower but concrete question for lawmakers beyond Florida: whether surrogacy contracts anywhere in the U.S. adequately protect the resulting children when an intended parent, foreign or domestic, simply walks away after conception. Florida answered that question for future contracts involving certain foreign nationals. It offers nothing for the two boys currently in foster care.