Christine Loh sidesteps HK law against paying surrogate mum

By having a baby girl born to a surrogate mother in the US, Christine Loh Kung-wai and Craig Ehrlich sidestepped a Hong Kong law which would have barred them from paying the woman.

Former Sunday Communications mobile boss Mr Ehrlich revealed yesterday that he had paid the woman who carried six-week-old Leah Norma.

He said he had given the 30-year-old American mother of three enough to help her and her husband put a deposit on a house.

Mr Ehrlich, 49, was speaking from Manila before boarding a plane to join his infant daughter and Civic Exchange think-tank head Ms Loh in Los Angeles for Father's Day, hours after the South China Morning Post broke the news of the surrogate birth.

Mr Ehrlich said the mother had been psychologically profiled and he interviewed her and her husband before agreeing to go ahead with the surrogate pregnancy.

'You are never 100 per cent comfortable,' he said. 'But you look for a candidate who gives you as much comfort as you can in a situation that potentially has certain serious risks. Then you go ahead and follow the legal issues very closely and hope that everything will work out, and it has.'

Former legislator Ms Loh, born in 1956, plans to legally adopt the baby when the child comes to Hong Kong in August.

Mr Ehrlich said that if he thought the Los Angeles couple 'were doing it solely for the money, it would have bothered me'.

But he said they put his mind to rest when they told him they wanted to help a childless couple - 'so it was for altruistic reasons. I don't want to go into the costs, but it was not outrageous.' Mr Ehrlich still sees the woman who gave birth to Leah Norma weekly to pick up expressed breast milk.

Although the surrogate mother has no legal rights to see the child, he has not yet decided whether to allow her to visit or see the baby later. 'It is completely my decision,' he said. 'You want to be sure there that no emotional attachment ever grows in this situation. So far she has handled it extremely well.

'She asked if she could hold Leah at the hospital and I said yes. I go to her house once a week to pick up frozen breast milk. One day Leah travelled with me and it went fine ... Her emotional stability is very high.'

The egg for the pregnancy was taken from a Chinese woman in the US and fertilised by sperm from Mr Ehrlich by in vitro fertilisation.