We’ve Reached The Infanticide Stage Of Commercial Surrogacy

An unborn baby boy whose parents wanted him aborted will receive potentially lifesaving care at birth for a severe heart condition after Attorney General Ken Paxton secured an emergency court order compelling doctors to treat the child regardless of his parents’ wishes.

The only reason Gabriel needed a legal promise of protection in the first place is because his parents, the Californians who paid to create him in a lab via in vitro fertilization (IVF) and rented the womb of a woman in Alaska to gestate him, thought in utero diagnosis should disqualify him from life.

Gabriel was first diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) at 20 weeks gestation. HLHS is a severe condition that requires immediate medical intervention after birth, but it is not an automatic death sentence if treated properly. New York-Presbyterian Hospital estimates that infants with HLHS who receive surgical treatments have a 72 percent survival rate to age 5 and retain a 90 percent survival rate by the time they turn 18 years old.

That data didn’t matter to Gabriel’s parents, named Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed in the latest court documents, who demanded their surrogate McKenna West seek a literal death sentence for Gabriel in the form of a late-term abortion. They cited a clause in their surrogacy contract that permitted abortion if the pregnancy yielded an “anomaly.”

West not only refused to comply, but the single mother relocated from Alaska to Texas with the hope that the baby she is carrying will receive the care he needs.

“I want to fight for him because he deserves that chance,” West said. “My goal is to get him surgery.”

Her attempt to secure legal custody of Gabriel after birth so she could secure treatment, however, was countered by the couple who “sought to compel her to give birth in California, stopped payments, and demanded repayment plus damages that could reach $250,000.”

While courts in Alaska and California wade through the largely unregulated and muddled legal minefield of surrogacy to determine parentage and jurisdiction in this case, Paxton determined the Lone Star State would not sit idly by as Gabriel’s September due date rapidly approached. Especially since, as Paxton noted in the Tuesday press release, the couple “refused to agree that they will consent to the life-saving surgery for Gabriel after he is born.”

The 301st District Court in Dallas ultimately granted temporary relief that forbids anyone from withholding, obstructing, or delaying Gabriel’s care. The order also declares “no person shall: remove the child from the [hospital where he’s treated], [and] remove the child from the state of Texas.”

“The court has made the right decision in immediately acting to protect baby Gabriel’s life and ensure he receives the care he deserves,” Paxton said in a statement on Tuesday. “My office utilized every tool at our disposal to protect life, and we will not back down in continuing to support baby Gabriel’s well-being. Every child in our state deserves to be cared for and protected, and that’s exactly what I’ll fight for.”

Even the court order, however, is not bulletproof against the dangers surrogacy contracts pose to baby’s lives.

“The court notes that nothing in this order limits the right of the surrogate mother to make decisions to safeguard her own health or the health of the pregnancy,” Paxton’s press release noted.

West already declared she would not abort Gabriel, but the authority and means for that still exists. Which is exactly why my Federalist colleague John Daniel Davidson used this case to argue that surrogacy is “a form of slavery” that “should be abolished.”

He’s not the first to point out the similarities between surrogacy and slavery. And as cases like Gabriel’s continue to make global news, he won’t be the last.

Surrogacy exploits vulnerable women and puts them at the center of impossible decisions. More importantly, it denies children’s natural rights to life, to a mother and father, and to freedom from commodification.

It is the commodification that comes with third-party reproduction like surrogacy that puts lifesaving care for an infant in limbo in the first place. The value and worth of a baby’s life should not be determined by his physical condition and it certainly shouldn’t be decided by a couple of words on a contract. Something is critically wrong with a society and culture that requires an emergency order solicited by an attorney general to save an infant with a severe heart problem.

Bills to ban child predators and foreigners from buying babies will only do so much to curb the inherent immorality of the rent-a-womb industry. Even if a surrogate like West experiences an uncomplicated pregnancy that ends in the birth of a healthy baby who goes home to people who will love and cherish him, that child will still be the product of an arrangement that considered his rights and needs last.

Baby Gabriel deserves to live and be medically treated not because a court said so, but because he is a human whose life had value from the moment he was conceived. He didn’t survive creation in a lab and likely some time in a cryopreservation freezer only to die because the people who paid for his creation decided he was no longer wanted. As long as the third-party reproduction industry flourishes, however, imminent death for embryos and unborn deemed unworthy at the commissioning party’s whim is always a risk.

Jordan Boyd is an award-winning staff writer at The Federalist and producer of “The Federalist Radio Hour.” Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.