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Alysa Liu has been in the Olympic headlines, not just for her masterful performance as a figure skater and a gold medal winner, but because of the nature of her birth. Her father decided to have her born by way of an anonymous egg donor and a surrogate mother. It was probably much more convenient than getting married again (he has an ex-wife). Alysa Liu has four more sisters, born in the same way.
So, what is the backstory of Liu’s father, Arthur Liu?
Arthur, an immigrant from China who later worked in real estate and law-related fields, made the decision to become a parent on his own through surrogacy. According to NBC Olympics, Alysa was born in California in 2005 with the help of a surrogate mother.
As she was growing up, Arthur Liu decided to take control of every aspect of her life. She began her career at the age of five. He hired several coaches to train her, and fired several that he didn’t approve of. He interfered with the coaches’ instruction, even when they asked him not to. Alysa’s father has tried to defend his actions by making several points: in a CBS interview, he wanted them to know that he had spent $500,000 to $1,000,000 on Alysa’s career. His ex-wife was Alysa’s guardian, even after the divorce. Arthur’s mother helped him raise Alysa by coming over from China for a couple of years.
But after the 2022 Olympics, she’d had enough of her father’s dominance and of the sport. As Alyssa said to CBS News, “It was basically his business. It wasn’t really mine.”
His obsession about having a figure skating daughter was clear:
‘I spared no money, no time,’ Arthur said of getting Alysa into ice skating in the 2026 60 Minutes special. ‘I just saw the talent.’
In addition to supporting Alysa with her skating lessons and taking her to competitions, Arthur participated in his daughter’s training aspects by watching her practices and tracking the speed of her jumps with a radar gun.
Tracked the speed of her jumps with a radar gun?
Alysa didn’t consult her father when she decided to leave figure skating in 2022, nor did she tell him she was going to return to the sport to compete in the 2026 Olympics.
Alysa Liu’s birth situation raises many questions about the ethical issues around surrogacy. A first question is whether surrogacy is appropriate to pursue, simply for convenience: Arthur chose not to get married, so he farmed out for the embryo. Another issue is that Alysa was intentionally created for a single-parent household; she will never know what it means to have a mother. Is this a fair and ethical decision to make?
From the very beginning, a child born through surrogacy begins life in a body that is temporarily rented and legally bound to be returned. Often, they are conceived using donor eggs or sperm, meaning their biological parentage has been intentionally divided, anonymized, or erased. Love does not undo the fact that money, contracts, and technology have overridden the natural bond between mother and child, treating women’s bodies as a service and children’s beginnings as a transaction.
When surrogacy is pursued, it should be taken seriously and with the child’s future in mind:
Because no matter how famous the parents, and no matter how successful the child, every child begins the same way: dependent, vulnerable, and deserving of a beginning that puts their needs first. These children do not need our silence. They need our honesty, our courage, and our willingness to ask whether paying for reproduction—especially on the world’s most influential stages—comes at a cost we are asking the most vulnerable to bear.
Arthur Liu’s motives regarding the pursuit of surrogacy are questionable. Here is one statement he made to Sports Illustrated in 2019:
Arthur Liu said that he intentionally chose Caucasian egg donors for his children because he, ‘felt his children would benefit from a diverse gene pool’ and a multicultural upbringing.
So while he doesn’t know the biological mother of his five children, he ensured that they would be Caucasian.
That does not sound like true fatherly love.
[originally published in American Thinker]
Discussion (48)
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Surrogacy is always unethical. Pregnancy is an inherently risky state, with a 25% chance of requiring major surgery (a Caesarean section) to complete. To induce a woman to undertake pregnancy for mere money is wrong.
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I wonder who the women are who consent to doing this--is it really just the money?? I assume so, but it's an ugly choice.
MODERATOR
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I am uncertain about surrogacy. I am sympathetic with couples who want a child to fill out their nuclear family but cannot do so naturally.
I have concerns when a child is created for the benefit of someone without the expectation of a stable nuclear family featuring two sexes in their upbringing. But I am not foolish to believe that that which is produced “as nature intended” is automatically better for any given child than one born of surrogacy to a caring family.
One might think of surrogacy as “adoption plus”. I know of families that both good and bad experiences with adoptions just as I know people with good and bad experiences with natural children. Nothing is guaranteed. Both heartache and joy can flow from either.
I know this is probably a lot of words to say “it’s complicated”.
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I'm not hard against surrogacy in general, but in the Liu case, I thought it was incredibly selfish.
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It's a weird world where genetically modified foods are a great sin but creating humans the natural way makes you a backward dweeb.
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