The Patriot Post® · Surrogate Mother Saves Preborn Baby

By Emmy Griffin ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/129938-surrogate-mother-saves-preborn-baby-2026-08-14

McKenna West was a nurse in Alaska. As a single mother of two, she was looking for ways to supplement her income and support her family. A friend of hers had a great experience as a surrogate, so West decided to give it a try.

Surrogates can earn between $58,000 and $85,000 per pregnancy, and that’s not even including bonuses for carrying multiple babies or undergoing a C-section. Some intended parents also provide a monthly allowance and pay for maternity clothes, so, in reality, the earnings are much higher.

For a single mother like West, this is a life-changing amount of money, so she applied to a surrogacy agency and was matched right away with a couple in California named Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed.

West was 20 weeks into the pregnancy when she and the parents received hard news: the baby boy had been diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) — a rare but highly survivable congenital heart condition.

Because the surrogacy contract gave the intended parents the option to abort the baby, Gilkar and Ahmed decided to terminate the pregnancy when they determined he wasn’t “perfect.” West knew that the couple could not force her to undergo an abortion; nevertheless, deciding to preserve the boy’s life would have legal and financial consequences.

Those consequences started right away. The intended parents continued to pressure West into aborting the otherwise healthy baby. An Alaska judge decreed that West could make her own medical decisions. However, the state also said that a California court should decide where West gave birth and who her medical team should be.

West then decided to move to Texas and give birth there. She is also suing for custody of the child. The California couple “refused to agree” to let medical teams perform the life-saving surgery that the little boy needed immediately after birth. In Texas, though, the law recognizes the birth woman as the “gestational mother,” giving West stronger legal grounds for her custody case. A Texas court further ensured that the baby would indeed receive the medical care he needed with or without the California couple’s consent.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton personally intervened in this case, stating, “The court has made the right decision in immediately acting to protect baby Gabriel’s life and ensure he receives the care he deserves. Every child in our state deserves to be cared for and protected, and that’s exactly what I’ll fight for.”

However, the same Texas court also placed West under a restraining order. She was never allowed to hold the little one she so bravely saved. That little one was never able to be held by the only person he had ever known.

West’s story is not the first in which a surrogate took drastic action to save a preborn baby’s life. One surrogate was asked to abort a baby because the child had a highly treatable cleft palate. Another was asked to undergo an abortion because she needed to deliver the baby early after she found out she had cancer and needed to undergo chemo.

Bottom line: Surrogacy and the IVF industry have turned babies into a disposable commodity. These precious lives are being reduced to petri dish perfection, partly because the biological mother, if there even is one (the two other examples were surrogates for gay couples), is divorced from the process, and the continued bonding that’s initiated during the pregnancy isn’t there.

While IVF and surrogacy provide a solution to parents struggling with infertility, these practices are inherently problematic.

The IVF process generally creates more embryos than a couple intends to use, and those surplus little lives are placed on ice indefinitely or discarded. IVF is also being used as a baby factory by allowing parents to choose the color of their child’s eyes or hair — not through science or magic, but through eliminating the babies that don’t have those desired traits.

Surrogacy is fraught in a different sort of way. Because virtually anyone can hire a surrogate, people with terrible intentions are known to rent women’s wombs. This can set up innocent children for human trafficking, foreign adversary psyops, or — just like in this case — death through abortion because they aren’t perfect.

There are obviously some amazing, wonderful people who have used or come into the world through this process — but at what cost? For every loved and adored child, there is one who is seen as a luxury item and made to someone’s specifications, or one who is killed because they failed to meet quality inspection.

There has to be a better way. These lives deserve better.

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