HONG KONG — After a long legal battle in China with no known precedent, a surrogate mother has given birth to a boy four years after his parents died in a car crash, a local newspaper has reported.

Shen Jie and Liu Xi, a couple in the eastern Chinese city of Yixing, tried without success to conceive in the first two years of their marriage. They decided to pursue in vitro fertilization, but on March 20, 2013, five days before the embryos were to be implanted, they were killed in a car crash, Beijing News reported on Tuesday in an article detailing the court battle that followed.

The husband and wife were both only children, and the couple’s parents resolved to use surrogacy to continue the family line. Surrogacy is illegal in China, and the first obstacle for the families was obtaining the embryos.

(Read about how surrogacy has been growing in China because of rising infertility, a relaxation of the one-child policy and a cultural imperative to have children.)