A surrogate mother who says she refused to abort a baby diagnosed with a serious heart condition is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene after a Texas judge ruled against her in a custody dispute with the California couple who hired her.
Attorneys McKenna West filed an emergency application on Wednesday, asking the nation’s highest court to halt a California court order recognizing Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar as the legal parents of the child, who was born in Texas on Aug. 12 with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome (HLHS). The filing comes after a Texas court “granted full faith and credit to the California judgment and dismissed [West] from the proceeding with prejudice” on Sept.
2, according to the emergency application filed by West’s attorneys. “A stay is needed to preserve the status quo and ensure M.W. (McKenna West) can advocate for her rights and remain informed about Baby G. during this critical time in his young life,” the filing states.
West, who lives in Alaska, is seeking final custody or conservatorship, arguing that she does not trust the couple to provide life-saving care to the baby, whom she calls Gabriel. Ahmed and Gilkar have insisted, however, that the child’s name is Rumi.
The surrogate and her attorneys argue that, “within minutes” of receiving the diagnosis of HLHS, Gilkar “asked whether it was possible to abort him instead.” Then, within days of the diagnosis, the filing alleges, Ahmed and Gilkar demanded that West end the baby’s life by undergoing a two-day-long, late-term abortion in Seattle. “Supreme Court caselaw has long recognized that the right to care for one’s child is a fundamental right under the Constitution.
It also recognizes that a birth mother is presumptively the legal mother of a child, and the government cannot take away the birth