Mom fights to win back her twins
Print Edition
A 39-year-old widow who lost custody of her twins because they were born to a surrogate mother yesterday appealed to the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court to win them back.
In an earlier trial, the woman, surnamed Chen, was ordered to give up the twins to her late husband’s parents on the grounds she was neither the biological nor adoptive mother.
Chen, a kindergarten teacher, is unable to have children, so she and her husband, surnamed Luo, found an organization that helped them arrange a surrogate birth.
Surrogacy is illegal in China, but this issue was not raised at the trial.
The twins were born to a surrogate mother on February 13, 2011, then given to Chen and Luo, who raised them.
Luo died of pancreatic cancer on February 7 last year. After that Chen raised the twins alone.
On December 29, however, Luo’s parents, aged 82 and 76, filed and won a lawsuit demanding custody of their two grandchildren.
Chen then filed an appeal with the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court.
In court yesterday, Chen argued that she has been living with the two children for nearly five years and can take care of them better than their grandparents.
Her lawyers said also that as the grandparents are old, if they fall sick, the children would end up being passed to Luo’s sister, who lives in the United States.
This would be “disadvantageous to the children’s growth due to the separation from their mother and the unfamiliar environment in a foreign country,” the attorneys said.
“The two children are in kindergarten. I don’t believe that their elderly grandparents are able to send them to hospital at midnight in the future,” Chen said.
“And I earn 10,000 yuan (US$1,600) a month, which is more than enough to raise them,” she said.
No verdict was reached yesterday.
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