The urge to have a child hit Geng Le hard after age 35. A former cop from China’s Hebei province, he’d launched a gay dating app called Blued a couple of years earlier, in 2012, and had become something of an icon for the Chinese LGBT community. Still, he felt his life was somehow incomplete without a child and that he owed it to his parents to sire a new generation. The next question was how to go about it. A friend had become a parent to triplets via surrogate, but that seemed sketchy because surrogacy is illegal in China. Another option was Thailand, a popular, relatively low-cost option, but by 2015 that country had banned foreign surrogacy.