Twenty-eight-year-old McKenna West could do a great deal of good with sixty thousand dollars. The money would translate into more time to spend with her two young children, more financial margin for the Alaskan single mother who was already working 12-hour shifts as a cardiac nurse. All she would have to do was spend nine months as a gestational carrier, offering her healthy young body as an incubator for someone else’s baby.
This part of West’s story is, sadly, not unique. The poorly regulated American commercial surrogacy industry freely exploits financial motives to convince vulnerable women that being impregnated with another woman’s fertilized egg is a reasonable and honorable side hustle, as well as an opportunity to perform an altruistic act for an infertile couple longing to be parents. Before the expiration of her surrogacy contract, however, the Alaskan surrogate would realize that her callow offer to help a suffering man and woman “create their family,” rather than proving a profitable path to greater financial stability, had embroiled her in contentious proceedings of a nature she could never have imagined.
West’s chosen couple soon materialized. After making contact with Worldwide Surrogacy Specialists, a Connecticut agency, West gravitated to the profile of Nausheen Gilkar, a forty-something beauty and fashion products professional, and her husband Omar Ahmed. Along the way, the surrogate would discover what is now public knowledge on multiple news platforms—that Gilkar’s struggles with infertility had spurred her to undertake eight cycles of IVF before her body refused to take it anymore. West thought that the husband and wife were “lovely,” and the parties quickly agreed to meet during a video call.
A 2025 systematic review from the MDPI Psychiatry Journal declares that “when surrogates and intended parents have a good relationship, the surrogate’s experience is more positive—and the emotional boundary around the baby stays healthier for both sides.” Regrettably, the nature of that boundary, described in articles like this one Surrogate Bonding: Connection vs. Attachment Explained | Physician’s Surrogacy would start alarm bells screeching around anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of history. “Research shows surrogates bond with the baby differently than expectant mother,” the essay declares, “Through care and protection, not ownership.”
What care-and-protection measures did McKenna West bind herself to in the contract she signed with Gilkar and Ahmed on August 29, 2025? Among them, the young surrogate pledged to abstain from sexual intercourse for three-week periods before and after the attempted embryo transfer, a measure that ought to raise a few eyebrows among reproductive rights advocates who glorify on-demand copulation between consenting adults, regardless of its evident practical intention, in this case, of preventing an “accidental” natural birth. West would also have to submit to drug testing at the request of the Intended Parents who might “feel that they do not have as much control over the pregnancy as they would have if the Intended Parent were pregnant” (A devastating bit of logic, that!), to avoid sushi, unprocessed Caesar dressing, and a host of other forbidden foods, and to ensure that the names of the Intended Parents, not her own, were properly recorded on the child’s birth certificate. In addition, the surrogate agreed that she would consent to an abortion in the case of a fetal anomaly, a situation that the agency assured her was extremely rare.
Other boiler-plate language initialed by West required her to acknowledge that she did not “desire or expect to have any formal communications with the Child or the Intended Parents after delivery, unless all Parties agree to the same.” The surrogate disclosed in her Live Action interview that she, Gilkar, and Omar had actually discussed the likelihood of her continued involvement in the baby’s life, if such a relationship happened naturally. Riding the wave of excitement at the start of the project, West believed that such a connection might be in the cards. “The chemistry felt great,” she told pro-life advocate Lila Rose on a Live Action podcast on August 4. Nevertheless, she was careful to caution her five-year-old son that the baby “would not be coming home with us.” According to West, her child accepted the situation matter-of-factly. “That’s cool,” he said. As the pregnancy progressed, however, the little boy would enjoy conversing with the little one in his mother’s “belly.”
According to West, the early months of her pregnancy proceeded without major incident. However, by her second trimester, a small rift or two had crept into her relationship with Gilkar and Ahmed—a minor squabble over the provider she had chosen, a reduction in communication from the biological parents. It was not until West’s twentieth week of pregnancy, however, that things began to deteriorate in short order.
In April, an anatomy ultrasound shared on FaceTime with the intended parents abruptly revealed that the child West was carrying had a severely underdeveloped heart. The day after this emotionally charged revelation, West checked in with Ahmed and Gilkar. She discovered that the couple had already removed the twelve-week ultrasound pictures from their refrigerator. After that chilly conversation, she said, the surrogacy agency suddenly assumed control of all correspondence behind the parties.
Meanwhile, the surrogate related, she continued to follow up the baby boy’s diagnosis, which a specialist soon identified as hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS). In order to provide for lifesaving surgical treatment within a week of the birth, West learned, she would need to temporarily relocate to another state with specialists trained for the procedure. Encouragingly, the doctor told her that the national survival rate after the first surgery was around eighty to eighty-five percent. West herself knew a mother whose 15-year-old daughter had started life with the same condition and was now thriving, so she clung to hope.
However, despite the heartening prognosis for the baby, McKenna dreaded hearing from Omar and Gilkar. Aware that this couple were not “extremely wealthy,” she was concerned that they would choose to abort the baby because of the additional financial burdens involved. Through discussions with the agency liason, she attempted to persuade the couple that children with HLHS could have very good outcomes; however, her efforts failed. Just a few days after the fateful diagnosis, the liason called the surrogate at work and told her that the intended parents had requested termination of the pregnancy. Her caller then instructed West to get an out-of-state referral for the late-term abortion.
Despite her horror at the prospect of killing the baby with whom she shared a profound physical bond, the young woman felt that she had no choice but to comply. “I knew what I would do and what choice I would make,” said West, “But I felt that I didn’t have a voice in this situation.” She feared that if she refused, she would face a crippling lawsuit: “Who am I, as a single mom, to go into a legal battle?” Accordingly, she made an appointment for a 22-week abortion in Seattle, but the difficulty of finding a support person to accompany her to Washington forced her to push the procedure date out by an additional week.
While the surrogate searched for a solution to this new problem, she received a call from her older brother. Her voice breaking, the young woman described what happened next: “He just shared with me how deeply he did not want me to have to go through with this procedure, and he knew how I felt about it, and how scared I was, and he told me that he had talked to his wife, and that they would adopt this baby, if it meant a way out for me.” Assuring the traumatized young woman that “she would be taken care of,” he rekindled her courage. “Facing financial ruin was scary,” said West, “But nothing was scarier than questioning my own soul and knowing what would happen to this baby boy if I flew to Seattle.”
It was this unexpected offer of help, McKenna West related, that inspired her to connect with Lila Rose of Live Action. Rose’s organization eventually paid the airfare for the surrogate and her two children to relocate to Texas, a strong pro-life state whose laws would recognize her as the birth mother of the baby and enable her to make medical decisions. There, Attorney General Ken Paxton procured a court order directing two Texas hospitals to provide the lifesaving care needed by little “Gabriel,” (as West had come to call him). However, West’s relief was short-lived. A Texas judge upheld a previous California court decision identifying Ahmed and Gilkar as the legal parents, which triggered a temporary restraining order against the young surrogate. On August 12, the child was born…but the woman who had nurtured him inside her body would be quickly shut out of this profound event.
In this January 10, 2024 piece, Danielle Tumminio Hansen admits that commercial surgery sometimes involves atrocious abuses, citing the case of a facility in India where the women were confined to crowded dormitories and routinely subjected to C-sections to speed the process along. However, she insists that these abuses, and supposed outlying cases like McKenna West’s, do not tell the whole story, maintaining that surrogacy, done properly, can give some of its practitioners a healthy jolt of self-esteem. These women, she suggests, “believe their powers of procreation provide them with a unique opportunity to help others.” However, a perceived emotional good for one person that barrels over the common-sense rights of another is, in the end, no good at all, as the following part of this essay will demonstrate.
