Over the last few weeks, a real-world Lifetime movie has played out before our very eyes — and, sadly, it’s not one of the ones where an adult woman goes back to high school and pretends to be a teenager in order to relive her cheerleading glory. Instead, it’s one of the ones in which a surrogate goes off the deep end and tries to steal a baby, which is much less amusing in real life than it is on basic cable.
Last August, after Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed learned that Gilkar would not be able to carry a baby, they hired Alaska nurse McKenna West as a surrogate. Like any responsible parents, Gilkar and Ahmed vetted West and worked out a contract requiring certain things of her, including that she have an abortion in the case of a severe fetal anomaly. She agreed. When it did turn out that there was such an anomaly — hypoplastic left heart syndrome — West agreed to have an abortion. That should have been that. However, West changed her mind, sought the support of anti-abortion-rights groups and politicians, and ran off to Texas, where abortion is illegal, in order to have the baby anyway.
Now, West is demanding that she be given custody of the child, whom she has named “Gabriel” and Gilkar and Ahmed have named “Rumi.” While Gilkar and Ahmed have filed a restraining order against West, and she has been barred from contact with the child, Texas Attorney General (and Senate hopeful) Ken Paxton has issued a court order to require them to provide medical care to the newborn (which they were going to do anyway, just not in Texas), who must now undergo a very serious open-heart surgery that may or may not work out in the end.
After a hearing on Tuesday, a judge decided to extend the restraining order another two weeks while the custody fight continues.
To be fair, this isn’t an entirely uncomplicated situation, and people should always have the option of changing their mind about having any surgical procedure. In fact, West had this option no matter where she was located as Gilkar and Ahmed actually could not have “forced” her to have an abortion anyway, regardless of what was in the contract.
But by making it a whole anti-abortion thing by running away to Texas, involving Ken Paxton and anti-abortion rights lunatic Lila Rose of Live Action, demanding custody and “giving” the child of non-Christian parents an explicitly Christian name … she’s not exactly making it easy for people to have much empathy for her. Especially since it seems that her real reason for hightailing it to Texas was because the state doesn't automatically confers parental rights to the biological parents and can, in some cases, grant custody (called conservatorship in Texas) to the surrogate if it is deemed to be in the child's best interests.
Additionally, it was West’s responsibility in the first place to not agree to be a surrogate for a couple whose views on abortion differed from her own. There are far more people looking for surrogates than there are surrogates, so it’s hardly as though this was not an option for her.
The condition Rumi has, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, is no joke. It’s a rare congenital defect that will require lifelong serious cardiac care, if he even survives the initial surgeries. While about 70 percent of babies with the condition will live to age five, and 90 percent of those who live past five will make it to 18 or older, the average life expectancy is only about 30.
Rumi has undergone the first surgeries to treat the defect, known as the Norwood procedures, which can cost from $214,000 to over $600,000. And it’s not been pleasant for him.
Via NBC:
Gilkar told the court that the baby had no blood flow to the left side of his heart. Since surgery, she said, he has gasped for air, choked on tubes and needed a blood transfusion.
“He’s the most beautiful person I’ve never seen,” Gilkar said. “He’s the love of our lives. He’s suffering a lot.”
And they really didn’t want to have to see him suffer like that. In fact, they wanted him to get treatment at a facility in Los Angeles that is vastly superior to the one he is at in Texas, but they haven’t been allowed to take him out of the state, thanks to West’s nonsense.
Provided he survives this surgery, he will have to undergo two more serious surgeries, the Bidirectional Glenn Procedure, which can cost $82,000 to $234,000, and the Fontan procedure, which can cost $79,500 to $256,000.
West’s attorneys say that she just isn’t sure that Gilkar and Ahmed will go through with all of the surgeries, which will likely total over $1 million, and are requesting that she be granted “conservatorship” to force them to go through with it. Notably, she is not putting up that money herself and is also complaining that they are suing her for $100,000 — which is likely what she was paid to do the surrogacy in the first place. One would think she’d be happy to give that up in order to contribute to the cost of the surgeries, but that does not appear to be the case.
Within the last few years, mostly since the Dobbs decision, a sizeable portion of the anti-abortion-rights contingent has turned its ire to IVF and to surrogacy. This, in a lot of ways, really does prove that it was never really about “the babies” to begin with. We shouldn’t be too surprised, though, given the fact that surrogacy is frequently chosen as an option by the kind of people of whom they tend to be less than fond — women they believe their God has purposely made unable to have children, gay male couples, and, perhaps worst of all, the imagined “selfish” career women they think don’t want to deal with pregnancy or “ruin” their bodies with childbirth. Well before West came on the scene, X the Everything App was filled with insane posts suggesting that gay male couples who use surrogates (or who adopt) are child molesters and sobbing about the idea of a child being “torn away” from the woman who birthed them and grotesquely mocking women who have children this way.
Nice people! Clearly this is all because they care so very much about children and not because they hate gay people and women!
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Now, none of this is to say that there are not issues with surrogacy — there are, and they should be discussed by sane, reasonable people who don’t have alternate agendas regarding abortion, dismantling LGBTQ+ rights, and pushing women to have babies at a younger age. There are certainly labor issues involved, concerns over the fact that pregnancy itself is dangerous (particularly, may I note, in places like Texas) and exploitation issues, especially as it concerns international surrogacy. It’s important that anything like this be done as ethically as possible. We should also have universal socialized health care so that parents don’t find themselves in a situation of being forced to pay upwards of a million dollars for surgeries if a surrogate refuses to abort a child with a severe birth defect. That’s not nothing. Many of these people have been saving up for years to afford a surrogate, and half of all Americans cannot afford a surprise medical bill of $500 or more, nevermind a million.
It’s actually unfortunate that terrible people with terrible agendas are co-opting this conversation, as it makes everyone normal get their hackles up to fight them and feel the need to defend everything about the practice, when that shouldn’t be the case.
Hopefully Rumi will be okay and his parents won’t have to suffer the horrific, immediate loss they saw coming as soon as he was diagnosed, but he’s certainly not being helped by the anti-abortion rights freaks going around calling him “Gabriel.”
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
It's not about babies. It's about controlling women and their bodies.
"they wanted him to get treatment at a facility in Los Angeles that is vastly superior to the one he is at in Texas, but they haven’t been allowed to take him out of the state, thanks to West’s nonsense."
So the baby has to get inferior healthcare in order for the forced birthers to prove a point. How very life affirming!
/FFS