It started a decade ago, when Leslie Tai, who lives outside San Francisco, heard from a woman she’d met in Beijing and who told her that she was staying for a few months in Los Angeles. Tai’s friend was evasive about the purpose of her visit, until the pair finally had a video call and Tai watched her friend oil a round belly on camera. “She said, ‘I have a surprise for you,’” Tai recalled. “‘I’m having an American baby.’” Tai, who knew that her friend came from a poor family and was dating a wealthy older artist in China, asked if he had friends in southern California. “And she was like, ‘No, honey, you don’t need friends to do what I’m doing.’”
She was part of the birth tourism industry, which boomed during the Obama years, when scores of pregnant Chinese women of means invested in package deals that cost anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 and granted buyers the ability to fly across the world and stay for three months at a facility that catered to expectant mothers looking to score US citizenships for their children or skirt the one-child policy that was the law in China until 2015.
