Baby boy born four years after parents died in road accident

A baby boy was recently born through surrogacy in China - four years after his parents had died in a fatal road accident. The child's grandparents reportedly fought a lenghty legal battle to get the four fertilised embryos the couple had left at a local hospital.

The Beijing News reported that a surrogate mother from Laos gave birth to the baby - four years after Shen Jie and Liu Xi died in a road accident in Yixing in China's Jiangsu Province. The couple had been undergoing fertility treatment before they met with the accident.

There has been no precedent of parents of a deceased person inheriting the embryos of their child/children. In the case of Jie and Xi, their parents had to file two lawsuits in order to get the fertilised embryos in a case that made headlines in the Chinese media.

The parents of the deceased couple had to then take the help of a foreign surrogate because surrogacy is illegal in China. They eventually found a 27-year-old woman from Laos who gave birth to the baby in December of 2017. The baby has been nicknamed Tiantian which means sweet in Mandarin.