A California couple is suing their surrogate mother for refusing to abort the child she was carrying for them, alleging that she violated her contract by not killing the baby prior to his birth.
Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed have filed suit against McKenna West seeking more than $100,000 in damages, alleging she breached their surrogacy agreement, which included a clause allowing them to request abortion of the baby if it were found to have fetal abnormalities.
West, a cardiac nurse from Alaska, gave birth on Aug. 12 in Dallas to a baby boy diagnosed prenatally with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a serious but treatable heart condition. West called the child Gabriel; the contracting couple, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed of California, call him Rumi.
West had fled to Texas seeking the state’s protection for the baby after his birth. In an Aug. 20 op-ed in the New York Post, she said she was allowed only about 60 seconds with the newborn before the contracting couple took physical custody. She is currently barred from contact with the child under existing orders.
A hearing on parentage and related issues is scheduled for Aug. 25 in Dallas County.
West, a single mother, refused the request for an abortion following the diagnosis of the condition in April. The couple subsequently stopped paying for pregnancy-related expenses.
According to the pro-life group Live Action, West was willing to give birth in California, where the contracting couple reside, if they would commit to treating the baby’s heart condition, though they reportedly refused.
West said she chose Dallas Children’s Hospital in Texas due to its 100% success rate for the procedure the newborn needed.
“As a cardiac nurse, I knew this little one had a great shot at survival if given the opportunity to receive the necessary treatment,” she said.
The baby has undergone his first surgery for the heart condition and is receiving care in Texas under a court order secured by Attorney General Ken Paxton that required lifesaving treatment and barred his removal from the state.
Lee Budner, Gilkar and Ahmed’s attorney, said in a recent statement to TMZ that the couple is “devastated” that the baby’s birth and health issues have allegedly been “transformed into political theater” by West and Paxton.
In her op-ed, meanwhile, West denied claims that her actions were “political theater,” writing: “No woman should be forced to kill the baby inside her. Most importantly, every child deserves a chance to live.”
West stated she has given up any claims to the baby and is only requesting that the contracting couple commit to provide “the lifesaving treatment he needs. That is all it would take to end this.”
However, she wrote that the couple is “actively working to get the court order that required the baby’s continued treatment thrown out.”
Budner did not respond to EWTN News’ requests for comment, but TMZ reported that he said the couple is “following the advice of the baby’s medical team, just as any loving parent would,” adding that his clients, who are suing West for not aborting the child, “continue, as they always have, to place their baby’s health and well-being first.”
Irene Alexander, an associate professor of moral theology at the University of Dallas, told EWTN News that aborting a child with a treatable health condition is “almost like an Amazon mentality. If I don’t get exactly what I ordered, I want to send it back.”
Alexander described the practice of surrogacy, which the Catholic Church teaches is gravely immoral, as a “dissociation of all the aspects of human sexuality: love, parenthood, and the good of the child are all spliced into parts” that lead “the children to suffer because those things are inseparably connected.”
“Once you violate the order of reality that was intended to be one whole; once youʼve committed so many levels of injustice,” she said, “you’re left with the mess that does injustice to the child and to the unity of marriage.”
Christina Bennett, a news correspondent for Live Action, told “EWTN News Nightly” reporter Eric Rosales on Aug. 20: “Surrogacy exploits both mother and child. Women are not just wombs to be rented, and children are not just property to be sold with contracts to be signed.”
“Women deserve human dignity, children deserve human dignity, and surrogacy violates that, and it should be banned across the entire nation, as other countries have done,” she said.
[The dispute] “is a textbook example of what is wrong with surrogacy.
Joe ZalotEthicist, National Catholic Bioethics Center
Joe Zalot, an ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told EWTN News that the case demonstrates “how commercial surrogacy denigrates the surrogate, seeking to reduce her to subservient role vis-a-vis the genetic ‘parents,’ as well as how surrogacy contracts denigrate the dignity of the preborn child through the demand that it be killed if a prenatal anomaly is diagnosed.”
The dispute “is a textbook example of what is wrong with surrogacy,” Zalot continued. The controversial practice, according to Church teaching, “is never permitted because it severs the ‘inseparable connection’ between procreation and union, it violates the child’s right to be gestated by, and born of, its biological mother, and it violates the exclusivity of marriage as spouses have a right to become parents only through each other.”
Kimberly Bird, a spokeswoman for Live Action, told Rosales that the “very dark reality around … these abortion clauses that are put in [surrogacy] contracts are absolutely atrocious … no one has a right to tell a woman” she must kill “the baby sheʼs carrying.”
“And absolutely surrogacy should be banned,” Bird continued. ”Other countries have done it or have at least put severe restrictions on it.”
Colombia lawmakers proposed a bill outlawing surrogacy this week, while the practice is illegal in dozens of other countries around the world.
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