McKenna West wanted the child she was carrying to be born, but she was afraid the parents of the child she was carrying did not.
West, a nurse and single mother of two from Alaska, was serving as a gestational surrogate for Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed of California, when the child was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome at twenty weeks.
Gilkar and Ahmed allegedly ordered her to abort the baby boy, despite the condition being considered treatable through a series of life-saving surgeries.
West found her way to Texas, to ensure that the child she is carrying would be born.
The child was born on Wednesday and is now in the hospital and under the legal custody of Gilkar and Ahmed.
West has been commended by the state’s leading pro-life agency.
“Texas has shown yet again that it honors the dignity of surrogate mothers and unborn babies and that all lives are valuable and worthy of protection, regardless of the circumstances of their conception, diagnosis, or disability,” said Amy O’Donnell, the Executive Director of Texas Alliance for Life.
She said West’s story is not rare.
“Most surrogacy contracts include termination and selective reduction clauses,” O’Donnell told Crux Now. “[T]here is no government oversight,” she also said, “no transparency requirements, and no way to know how many embryonic lives are created and never accounted for.”
West has said the parents tried to invoke an abortion-upon-demand clause in the agreement and warned that they would sue her if she refused to abort the child.
“No contract should have the power to demand the death of a child because of a disability or diagnosis,” O’Donnell said.
Texas Alliance for Life supports common-sense guardrails that protect both surrogate mothers and the babies they carry at every stage of development,” she said.
“No parent, biological, intended, or otherwise,” O’Donnell also said, “has the right to deny life-saving medical care to a child.”
Attorney Lee Budner, who represents Gilkar and Ahmed, said the couple is assuring their child receives proper medical care.
“Right now, our clients are continuing to place their baby’s health and well-being first, following the advice of the baby’s medical team, as they always have and just as any loving parent would,” he said in a statement.
Joseph Meaney, the past President and Senior Ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, says the case highlights how surrogacy contracts routinely allow contracting parties to require surrogate mothers to abort if the child is discovered to have medical problems.
“Commercial gestational surrogacy clearly treats the child as a product and the woman who carries the pregnancy as a person whose womb is rented for a nine-month project,” he told Crux Now.
“The dignity of the child and the birth mother are severely disrespected,” Meaney said.
Meaney described the current situation in the U.S. as a “patchwork quilt” of different state laws governing surrogacy.
He explained there are so-called surrogacy-friendly states like California, Colorado, and New York that explicitly permit gestational surrogacy, enforce surrogacy contracts, allow financial compensation for surrogates, and grant pre-birth parentage orders for heterosexual and homosexual couples.
On the other end of the spectrum there are states like Arizona, Kentucky, and Nebraska that explicitly prohibit or void paid surrogacy contracts, making commercial arrangements legally unenforceable.
“Many U.S. states have no concrete legislation on surrogacy,” Meaney also said, “so, the practice there is not clearly legal or illegal.”
“The trend in recent years has been for states to legalize gestational surrogacy, sometimes with different restrictions,” said Meaney.
The Texas Alliance for Life has been actively engaged on the surrogacy issue at the state legislative level.
“Our Communications Director, Ashley Sosa, testified before the Texas Senate Health and Human Services Committee in an interim committee hearing on the dangers of foreign exploitation of surrogacy and the need for common-sense guardrails,” O’Donnell said.
“We believe Texas has an opportunity to lead the nation in establishing protections that honor the dignity of both women and the children they carry,” she told Crux Now.
As surrogate children are beginning to reach adulthood, the questions they are asking are a new topic that needs to be addressed.
“Some typical questions that seem to arise in younger children are the following: Was I in your tummy? Why couldn’t you carry me? Who is the lady who carried me? Do I have two moms?” Meaney said.
“Later on in life,” Meaney also said, “children born through surrogacy are often interested in getting to know their surrogate mother.”
Describing surrogacy as “an understudied problem, particularly when it comes to international surrogacy and children contracted by homosexual couples,” Meaney told Crux Now most research reporting on surrogacy has serious methodological limitations.
“It is often claimed that the surrogate mothers have little difficulty or trauma from giving up the children,” Meaney said, “but there is anecdotal evidence of the opposite.”
“The children born in this way are said to have no worse outcomes that children conceived and carried by their parents through in vitro fertilization,” Meaney said.
“I personally believe it has to be traumatic for children and lead to negative consequences,” Meaney said.
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome
