Surrogate Who Refused Abortion Request Takes Custody and Care Dispute to Supreme Court

An Alaska surrogate mother who refused a couple's demand to terminate a pregnancy after a severe congenital heart diagnosis has brought her legal fight to the United States Supreme Court. The surrogate is seeking urgent federal intervention to challenge a state court ruling that stripped her of the ability to advocate for the medically fragile newborn.

Attorneys representing McKenna West, a specialized cardiac nurse residing in Alaska, submitted an emergency application on Wednesday asking Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan to temporarily block a ruling from the Los Angeles Superior Court. That underlying California decision formally established the intended biological parents as the child's exclusive legal guardians.

Justice Kagan is the circuit justice assigned to handle emergency applications and related matters emerging from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a regional federal jurisdiction that includes California. As of the time of the emergency filing, Justice Kagan had not issued a formal order on the application.

The high-stakes legal dispute centers on a baby born in Texas on August 12 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, widely known as HLHS. The condition is a rare and life-threatening congenital defect in which the left side of the heart fails to develop properly. The conflict between the parties is underscored even by what they call the child: while the intended parents refer to him as Rumi, West refers to him as Gabriel.

The disagreement between the surrogate and the couple began months prior to the delivery, after the heart defect was first detected during a routine 20-week ultrasound examination. Following that diagnosis, intended parents Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, who reside in California, formally requested that West terminate the pregnancy pursuant to a specific provision in their gestational surrogacy contract regarding severe fetal abnormalities.

West refused to undergo an abortion, explaining to the surrogacy agency that she could not bring herself to abort the child after feeling him move in the womb. Drawing on her background in cardiac nursing, she also noted that viable medical treatments and surgical procedures were available to manage the condition after birth.

In an effort to find an alternative resolution that would keep the child alive, West offered to assume full parental responsibility herself or arrange an independent adoption if the intended parents did not wish to raise him. Under her proposal, Gilkar and Ahmed would have been released entirely from any ongoing financial support obligations.

Despite West's compromise offers, the dispute escalated into severe contractual threats. West's legal representatives allege that she was warned by representatives that carrying the pregnancy to term against the couple's directives could expose her to more than $250,000 in breach-of-contract penalties.

Gilkar and Ahmed subsequently turned to the California judicial system to establish their legal standing as the child's parents. West objected to the California court's authority, maintaining that the surrogacy agreement stipulated that any resulting legal disputes were supposed to be heard and resolved in Alaska.

When West filed materials in the Los Angeles Superior Court, she argued that her participation was strictly designed to contest the court’s personal and subject-matter jurisdiction. However, the California court concluded that West had submitted to its authority because she filed a 147-page submission that addressed the substance of the underlying custody dispute.

West’s legal team strongly disputed that finding in their Supreme Court filing, explaining that the overwhelming majority of the 147 pages were documentary exhibits submitted exclusively to substantiate her jurisdictional challenge. They noted that she consistently refused to argue the merits of the case before the California judge, arguing that a party's clear refusal to consent should not be treated by a court as agreement.

The emergency petition also challenges the legitimacy of how the California court documents were originally served. According to West's filing, proper service was never completed because a FedEx package containing the litigation papers was simply delivered to her babysitter, who was allegedly never informed of the contents or legal significance of the delivery.

The Los Angeles Superior Court entered a final order on June 22 declaring Gilkar and Ahmed the legal parents of the infant. Following that judgment, West sought to pause the ruling through three separate California state courts, but all three judicial panels declined to grant a stay.

With her state-level legal avenues exhausted, West is asking the Supreme Court to intervene so that she can regain standing to advocate for the infant's complex medical treatment. Her attorneys maintain that without a temporary stay of the California parentage order, the nurse remains entirely powerless to participate in crucial medical decisions as the child fights for his life in Texas.