A Florida Surrogate, a Father in China, and Two Children Trapped in a Legal System With No Clear Owner
A Florida gestational surrogate carried triplets for a Chinese intended father who could not enter the U.S. on schedule. One child died. The surviving boys spent about 20 months with the surrogate before an emergency court order scrambled custody again. The case is still unresolved, and it exposes how cross-border surrogacy can fail when visas, parentage paperwork, and agencies do not share one emergency plan.
In November 2024, Kyla Simpson of St. Augustine, Florida, delivered triplet boys at UF Health Jacksonville for an intended father living in China.
Local reporting has identified him as Chen Zhou. Coverage describes him as a single man who turned to U.S. gestational surrogacy because commercial surrogacy is illegal in China and single men face steep barriers to domestic adoption there.
According to First Coast News and later court coverage, the hospital’s gestational-surrogacy plan gave Simpson physical custody and decision-making authority until the intended parent arrived. He did not arrive before discharge.
The babies spent roughly two months in the NICU. By January 2025, Simpson and her husband had brought them home. Reporting puts the arrangement’s cost above $300,000.
What followed was not a clean handoff. It became a fight over visas, intermediaries, parentage paperwork signed across state lines, medical emergencies, and a Florida court that still has no tidy playbook.
The litigation remains unresolved. Neither adult’s story can be treated as a final verdict. The clearer lesson for families considering international assisted reproduction is structural: a contract that names who intended the pregnancy is not the same thing as a plan that works when a border, a virus, or a middleman gets in the way.
What the statutes and guidance already say
Florida’s gestational-surrogacy statute (Fla. Stat. § 742.15) makes a binding contract depend on a commissioning couple who are legally married and both 18 or older. Chapter 2026-66 (HB 905), effective July 1, 2026, further bars Florida gestational-surrogacy contracts when any party is a citizen or resident of a designated “foreign country of concern,” including the People’s Republic of China; contracts executed in violation are void and unenforceable. Separately, ASRM practice guidance strongly recommends single-embryo transfer in all gestational-carrier cycles because of the health risks of multiples. Mainland China is not a party to the 1980 Hague Child Abduction Convention with the United States, which is one reason courts treat outbound custody risk as hard to unwind after a child leaves U.S. jurisdiction.
Cross-border surrogacy sits at the intersection of fertility medicine, immigration, and custody law. When those systems do not share one emergency plan, children can spend years without a stable legal home even after adults have paid for, carried, or fought over them.
The arrangement looked complete until discharge day
Simpson has said she entered surrogacy hoping to help someone become a parent. First Coast News reported that she worked with a California agency to qualify as a gestational carrier and was matched with the intended father in China.
Coverage of court records describes a multi-embryo transfer. Simpson has said she was not adequately warned about the risks. One embryo reportedly split, producing triplets.
That detail matters clinically even before it becomes a custody story. ASRM’s gestational-carrier guidance strongly recommends transferring one embryo at a time precisely because multiple gestation raises risks for the carrier and the babies.
A high-risk triplet birth then collided with immigration timing. Reporting says Zhou told Simpson he was working on a visa so he could collect the children. He still was not in Jacksonville when the hospital was ready to send them home.
Caregiving filled the gap the handoff never closed
With physical custody already assigned to Simpson until arrival, the babies went home with the people who had been at the hospital.
For roughly 20 months, the Simpsons were the children’s day-to-day parents in everything but the clean legal sense of that word. Feeding, pediatric visits, bedtime, and grief all landed in one Florida household.
In 2025, one of the triplets died after respiratory complications tied to RSV, according to reporting based on Simpson’s account and court filings. She has said she buried the child she had been told was never hers to keep.
The surviving boys stayed with her. That length of attachment is not a technicality. Courts later had to weigh not only contracts and genetics, but two toddlers whose only continuous caregivers had been the surrogate household.
Visa trouble and alleged intermediaries made distance worse
Zhou has not given First Coast News an on-camera interview. Court documents cited in local and national coverage allege that his path to the United States was blocked by more than paperwork delays.
Reporting based on those filings says a visa application was denied and that an intermediary, named in documents as Jiapeng “Kent” Wan, allegedly took tens of thousands of dollars while sending false updates and AI-generated photos of the children. Those claims remain allegations in court papers, not findings we can treat as settled fact.
Simpson has told reporters that unknown men arrived at her home in March 2025 saying they had been sent to collect the boys. She refused. She later said she feared trafficking.
Whether those visitors were authorized agents, confused intermediaries, or something worse is still tangled in the record. For a household holding infants, the practical effect was the same: no trusted adult from the intended-parent side appeared with clear papers and a safe plan.
Parentage on paper is not the same as custody in a kitchen
In May 2026, Simpson moved to terminate the intended father’s parental rights and adopt the surviving children, according to First Coast News.
Zhou’s attorneys then secured an emergency pick-up order. On June 17, 2026, St. Johns County Judge Judy Rose Marie Preddy granted that order. The boys were taken into cradle care in Tampa and, court filings say, moved to an undisclosed California location on July 8.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office intervened. Coverage of the state’s filings argues that Florida parentage was never cleanly established under Florida law, including questions about California paperwork signed after the Florida birth. The state has asked the court to reconsider the pick-up order and has raised concerns about removal from the United States.
At a later hearing, Preddy called the dispute a “unicorn” under Florida’s custody chapter. There is, she said, no ready playbook for a surrogate who pushes back when the intended parent lives abroad and another state’s parentage order is in the mix.
Arguments on jurisdiction and the California order were set for further hearing in mid-August. A guardian ad litem is moving forward. None of that names a winner. It names a gap.
Florida’s rules were already narrow, then they got narrower
Even before 2026, Florida’s gestational-surrogacy statute was built around a married commissioning couple. A single intended parent sitting overseas was already outside the cleanest version of that statute’s design.
Then came Chapter 2026-66. Effective July 1, 2026, Florida law bars gestational-surrogacy contracts in the state when any party is a citizen or resident of a listed “foreign country of concern,” including China. Violating contracts are void and unenforceable as against public policy.
This birth happened in 2024, before that effective date. Counsel and commentators have argued about how far the new policy can reach backward. The Attorney General’s intervention still treats the arrangement as raising Florida public-policy interests now.
Readers should not confuse a new ban with a settled answer in this file. They should notice the larger pattern: states are rewriting who may commission a Florida pregnancy, while families are still living inside arrangements drafted under older assumptions.
Questions to settle before an international birth, not after
If you are an intended parent considering cross-border surrogacy, or a surrogate weighing a match with someone who may need a visa, treat the following as non-optional conversation topics with independent counsel on each side.
Who has physical custody and medical decision-making if the intended parent cannot enter the country by discharge day? Name the backup caregiver, the timeline, and the money for that care in writing.
Which state’s parentage order will be sought, when, and will it be recognized where the child actually lives? Do not assume a California form automatically settles a Florida newborn.
What happens if a visa is denied, an agency dissolves, or an intermediary demands cash for “retrieval”? Who verifies identities before anyone collects a child from a private home?
How many embryos will be transferred, and does every party understand ASRM’s single-embryo recommendation for gestational carriers? Multiples change NICU odds, funeral risk, and caregiving load overnight.
If the child may later travel to a country that is not a Hague Abduction Convention partner with the United States, what court orders and travel consents are required first? Mainland China is one such country.
A surrogacy contract can record intention with great precision. Intention alone does not feed a toddler, clear a visa desk, or tell a Florida judge what to do when two adults both claim the children and neither arrangement has a working emergency exit.