A Chinese couple died in a car crash five days before their embryos were to be implanted, and four years later a surrogate from Laos gave birth to their son

Shen Jie and Liu Xi, from Yixing in Jiangsu, were both only children. In 2012 they began IVF at Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, and four embryos were frozen. On 20 March 2013, five days before the planned transfer, both died in a road accident. The hospital would not release the embryos. Shen Jie's parents sued Liu Xi's parents. The first court ruled against them: embryos are a special kind of property with the potential for life and cannot be inherited. On 17 September 2014 the Wuxi Intermediate People's Court gave all four grandparents joint custody. It called embryos a transitional form between person and property and weighed the grief of parents who had lost their only children. The hospital would release the embryos only to another medical institution, and no Chinese hospital would take them. In June 2016 Shen's father got approval from a hospital in Laos through an agency; the families paid 300,000 yuan. A 28-year-old Laotian surrogate carried the pregnancy and travelled to Guangzhou. On 9 December 2017 she gave birth to a boy. His grandmother named him Tiantian. His grandfather Shen Xinnan raises him and planned to tell him his parents had gone overseas.