An Hui and Ye Jianbin, together with their three lively triplets, turn heads when they navigate the streets of China.
But an LGBT family with children, like Hui and Jianbin, is an exception rather than the rule for a country where raising a child can be a costly affair — let alone one born via surrogacy and conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF).
An is an investment manager who shuffles between Shenzhen, Yunnan and Hong Kong. He and his partner were able to afford the sky-high cost of IVF with a German egg donor, before their three boys — An Zhizhong, An Zhifei and An Zhiya — were carried to term via a Thai surrogate mother in 2014.
According to Families Through Surrogacy, a non-profit surrogacy organization, the average cost of hiring a surrogate in Thailand was $52,000 in 2014. Thailand has now outlawed commercial surrogacy after a well-known case of a foreign couple abandoning an IVF baby with down syndrome four years ago.
WATCH: The highs and lows of in vitro fertilization
In the U.S., the cost of IVF and surrogacy comes to over $100,000 on average, while in China, surrogacy and the trade of eggs and sperm are not allowed.
It’s barriers like these that are giving another LGBT couple, Duan Rongfeng and Li Tao, pause when thinking of starting a family. The couple met in 2004, run a small advertising company together and got married in 2015 in the United States. With a total monthly income of around 30,000 yuan ($4,350), Duan does not believe he can currently afford to have a child.
“I remember I calculated previously and figured I had to sell a house if I wanted a child.”
China runs a household registration system which issues “hukou” to individuals. Children who do not fall within the traditional family unit, such as children of gay parents or migrants, may not get a hukou and have no rights to a state-sponsored education. They also lose access to healthcare.
In the past few decades, China has decriminalized homosexuality and removed homosexuality from the category of a mental illness. But Bin Xu, the director of Beijing-based LGBT+ rights NGO Common Language, said childbearing remains “limited to the families of married heterosexuals.”
Bin, however, added that domestic reproductive services are still available, albeit in a grey area wherein would-be-parents are not protected by law if medical issues arise, forcing many to head overseas to ensure a level of legal protection for their child.
It was a consideration for An and Ye, whose three boys hold Hong Kong citizenship, not Chinese. An said that raising three children will contribute to the fight against declining birthrates, adding that he knows around 100 similar families around the country. An’s company has even invested in a surrogacy company which has offices in Russia and Thailand and helps all kinds of couples.
China’s declining birthrate and rapidly aging population prompted a move by the government in 2016 to allow all couples to have a second child, relaxing restrictions on childbirth that had been in place for nearly four decades. Reports earlier this year claimed the country was planning to scrap all limits on the number of children a family can have by the end of this year.
However, China remains a conformist society with strong Confucian values, and Duan said even if he and his partner were to have a child, they would have a hard time trying to explain to family, friends and even strangers.
“Everyone will definitely be happy, but besides happiness, how is she (mother-in-law) going to visit family members with the child and tell friends and relatives whose child he or she is or through what channel we get this child?” Duan said. “Perhaps this is a challenge when we face each family member.”
For now, the average gay Chinese couple, like Duan and Li, remains on the fence about having children, limited by their financial capabilities but also society’s pressure at large.
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