This baby was born four years after his parents died in a car crash

A baby boy was born to a surrogate more than four years after the death of his parents in a road accident, Chinese media has reported.

Shen Jie and Liu Xi had been married for two years when they decided to try In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). But the couple died in a car accident in March 2013 in Jiangsu province of China five days before the scheduled transplant.

What followed next was three years of a complicated and unprecedented legal case in China, by the parents of Shen and Liu, for the rights to four frozen embryos left by their late children.

Both sets of parents finally won custody of the embryos after several court battles in January 2017.

As surrogacy is illegal in China, they drove off to neighbouring Laos to find a mother through an underground agency. The boy was born in December 2017 to a 28-year-old surrogate at a hospital in Guangzhou. He was named Tiantian, or “sweet” by his grandparents.

“His eyes look like my daughter’s but overall, he looks more like his father,” Beijing News quoted Liu’s mother, Hu Xinxian, as saying.

But, that is not all.

Tiantian’s grandparents continued to grapple with the legal complications even after he was born. They had to undergo DNA tests to prove their relationship with the newborn and secure his custody.

As little Tiantian turned 100 days old on March 18, his paternal grandfather Shen Xinnan arranged a low-profile celebration.

However, the grandparents are still sceptical about how to share the truth with the child once he grows older.

“This boy is destined to be sad on his arrival into the world. Other babies have their fathers and mothers, but he doesn’t. We will definitely tell him in the future. How can we not?” Shen was quoted as saying by Beijing News.