Four years after the death of a Chinese couple, their son was born to a surrogate mother. Shen Jie and Liu Xi were married for two years when they decided to try In vitro fertilisation(IFV). However, five days before the scheduled date for transplantation of the fertilized embryos into Liu, the couple died in a car accident. The incident happened in March 2013 in the Chinese coastal province of Jiangsu.

Following which the couple's parents fought for the rights to four frozen embryos of their late children. The case was a complicated one as surrogacy is illegal in China. According to Beijing News, Shen and Liu's parents finally won custody of the embryos in January 2017 after three years of court battle. The to-be-grandparents then struggled to find a surrogate mother. Finally, with the help of an underground surrogacy agency, a baby boy was born in a hospital in Guangzhou.

Liu's mother Hu Xinxian named the baby Tiantian, which means sweet. Hu Xinxian told Beijing News, "Tiantian’s eyes look like my daughter's but overall, he looks more like his father."

The legal complications did not end there. The grandparents had to carry out DNA tests to prove their relationship to Tiantian and have the child's custody. The grandparents are not planning to tell Tiantian about his parents until he is old enough to understand. They said that they will tell him that his parents are overseas while he is still young.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 12, 2018 07:44 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).