A surrogate mother who refused a California couple's demand to abort a baby diagnosed with a treatable heart condition has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene after courts in two states stripped her of any contact with the child she carried to term.
McKenna West, a nurse from Alaska, filed an emergency petition with the nation's highest court on Wednesday, asking the justices to halt a California court order that recognizes intended parents Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar as the child's legal mother and father. West wants the Court to grant her custody or, at minimum, conservatorship of the boy, whom she calls Gabriel and the couple calls Rumi, born Aug. 12 in Dallas with a serious congenital heart defect called hypoplastic left heart syndrome.
The case sits at the intersection of surrogacy law, abortion, parental rights, and the life of a medically fragile infant. West claims the couple plans to place the baby in hospice care in California rather than allow the surgeries that could save his life. The couple denies it. And right now, a restraining order bars West from seeing, holding, or even receiving updates about the child she carried for months and delivered in a state she chose precisely because it bans most abortions.
The dispute traces back to May, when Ahmed and Gilkar learned the baby had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a condition in which the left side of the heart is critically underdeveloped. The couple requested that West terminate the pregnancy at 23 weeks of gestation. West refused.
The condition is severe but not a death sentence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that without treatment, hypoplastic left heart syndrome can lead to death within days or weeks. But surgical intervention exists. The Cleveland Clinic outlines a multi-stage treatment path: an initial surgery shortly after birth, a second procedure between four and six months of age, and a third between 18 months and four years old. Additional surgeries or a heart transplant may eventually be needed, but children do survive.
West traveled to Dallas to give birth, choosing Texas because of its near-total abortion ban, a legal shield she believed would protect the baby from termination. Breitbart reported that the couple's surrogacy contract contained an "abortion on demand" clause and that Ahmed and Gilkar threatened to sue West for $250,000 if she refused to comply.
West told the anti-abortion organization Live Action in an interview last month: "It was scary to think that something might be wrong, and that I may be the one that's not able to make a decision about the treatment."
Just before the baby's birth on Aug. 12, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office intervened. His office obtained an emergency court order requiring that the newborn receive lifesaving medical care. Just The News reported that Paxton stated at the time: "Baby Gabriel deserves a chance at life, and I will not allow anyone to unlawfully deny him medically necessary care."
The baby underwent surgery soon after birth. Lee Budner, the couple's attorney, said in August that the newborn was in critical condition and appeared to be "suffering from potential complications."
At an Aug. 25 hearing in Dallas, Gilkar testified and pushed back against West's claims. She called West "mentally unstable" and alleged that West had never told the couple she was traveling to Texas. Gilkar also testified that West withdrew access to the child's medical records, a claim West acknowledged during the hearing.
Gilkar told the court plainly:
"He's our child."
She added: "Denying lifesaving care is not true. We are devastated... We've never wanted anything more than those babies."
West, for her part, said she was open to dropping her custody claims if the couple would commit to lifesaving care for the baby. The couple has given no such commitment that appears in the court record.
After the hearing, both sides went publicly silent. The case file was sealed. Then on Sept. 2, a Texas court granted full credit to the California judgment, the order that recognizes Ahmed and Gilkar as the child's legal parents. West's plea for conservatorship was dismissed with prejudice, meaning she cannot refile it in Texas.
A separate restraining order bars West from seeing or holding the child and gives Ahmed and Gilkar sole authority over medical decisions. The couple has said they will not provide West with any updates about the baby's condition.
Surrogacy is not regulated at the federal level. Each state sets its own rules, and those rules vary widely, creating exactly the kind of jurisdictional collision this case illustrates. California's surrogacy-friendly framework gave Ahmed and Gilkar a court order declaring them the legal parents. Texas, where the baby was actually born, ultimately deferred to that California judgment.
West's attorneys argue in the Supreme Court filing that the California order is unlawful and that West should be recognized as the mother under Texas law. The filing states bluntly:
"The stakes of the decisions below are enormous. But because of the unlawful California judgment, she has been dismissed with prejudice from the Texas proceedings and denied any information about or control over the medically fragile child."
The emergency petition asks the justices to halt the California order while the broader legal questions are resolved. But the Supreme Court is not obligated to hear the case. Marla Neufeld, an attorney who represents parents, surrogates, and donors in other cases but is not involved in this one, indicated that the likelihood of the Court granting West's request is uncertain at best.
Emergency applications to the Supreme Court have become an increasingly common vehicle for high-stakes disputes. The Court has recently handled emergency petitions on redistricting and other politically charged matters, though each case turns on its own facts and procedural posture.
Ahmed and Gilkar had not yet responded to the Supreme Court filing at the time of publication. The New York Post reported that West remains completely barred from any contact with or information about the child, leaving her with no parental rights and no way to know whether the baby is receiving the follow-up surgeries medical experts say he will need.
At the heart of this case is a child roughly four weeks old at the time of the filing, a baby who has already undergone heart surgery and faces at least two more major procedures in the coming years if he is to have a chance at a full life. West believes the couple intends to forgo those surgeries and move the baby to hospice care in California. The couple says that accusation is false.
The question of who holds parental authority, and on what legal basis, is one that state legislatures and courts have struggled to answer consistently in surrogacy disputes. In this case, a woman who carried a child, refused to end his life, traveled across the country to deliver him in a state that would protect him, and watched a state attorney general fight for his medical care has been told by two court systems that she has no standing to even ask how he is doing.
The couple, meanwhile, has a California court order, a Texas court's deference, and a restraining order that gives them full control. Whether they will pursue the surgeries the baby needs remains an open question, one that West says she has no way to monitor and no legal right to challenge.
Republican officeholders and anti-abortion groups have rallied behind West, though the specific forms of that support are not detailed in the court record. The case has drawn national attention in part because it exposes how surrogacy contracts, private agreements between individuals, can override the instincts and actions of a woman who chose to protect a child's life at great personal and legal cost.
The Supreme Court's handling of emergency applications varies widely. Some are granted swiftly; others are denied without comment. West's attorneys face the challenge of persuading the justices that this dispute, rooted in state family law and a private surrogacy contract, raises the kind of constitutional question the Court needs to resolve on an emergency basis.
No federal framework governs surrogacy. No uniform standard determines when a surrogate's refusal to abort gives her standing to seek custody. And no court has yet answered the question West is now posing: whether a state judgment declaring intended parents the legal guardians of a child can stand when the surrogate alleges those parents plan to deny the child lifesaving care.
When a woman carries a child, refuses to end his life, and delivers him into the hands of doctors who can save him, and the legal system's response is to bar her from the room and seal the file, something has gone badly wrong with the law. Whether the Supreme Court agrees is another matter entirely.