McKenna West, a young gestational carrier thousands of miles from home, had just delivered the tiny infant boy she called Gabriel. The birth of every child is a major miracle, but this little one’s arrival was extraordinary. At twenty weeks, after the child had been diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, his biological parents, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, had requested West to get an abortion. She fled to Texas, hoping to establish her right to care for the baby. However, Texas upheld a California ruling declaring GIlkar and Ahmed to be the legal parents. They asserted their rights immediately.
In an August 20 editorial in the New York Post, West described the appalling moment in the delivery room when the intended parents had claimed the son that they had nearly condemned to death: “I haven’t been allowed to hold this precious baby boy I carried and protected throughout my pregnancy. The only glimpse I got of him was during a very short 60 seconds while his umbilical cord was still connected. As soon as the cord was cut, he was taken away.”
The baby boy, whom the legal parents named Rumi, underwent his first surgery six days later; news outlets later reported that he was in critical condition following complications from the procedure; after this update, the biological parents announced that they would no longer be providing information about the baby’s health.
At an August 25 court hearing, where the surrogate and the intended parents locked horns in a pitched battle over who would ultimately care for the boy, his biological mother, Nausheen Gilkar, mourned that she and her husband had been able to hold their sick child only a few times since his birth. “He’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen,” she said tearfully, “He’s suffering a lot.” When Attorney Jeff Domen inquired of Gilkar whether she regretted her initial decision to request an abortion, Gilkar said no. When Domen asked her whether she would be willing to entrust her child to someone who wanted her child dead, Gilkar said that she didn’t know how to answer the question.
The desire for a child is a beautiful thing, and the sacredness of every young life, whether it has been conceived in a loving marriage, on Prom Night, or in a petri dish, is undeniable. The confusing statements made by the biological mother highlight the contradictory impulses of so-called “intended parents” who profess deep (and probably genuine) love for the offspring that they have commissioned, without considering the damage that has been done to these little ones in their creation. The global children’s organization, Them Before Us, exists to educate the public about a topic that, curiously, gets so often left out of discussions about surrogacy—the right of children to be born naturally from the intimacy of their mother and father and raised by these same parents.
Their website explains what family is really about: “In the parent-child relationship, rights are symbiotic; the inherent right a mother and father possess to raise their child is tied to the fact that they’re the only two people responsible for bringing their child into existence.” Note the clear contrast between the notion of child ownership accepted by surrogacy advocates and the concept of owning the right to nurture one’s offspring; these philosophies are polar opposites—the latter approach is grounded in loving self-sacrifice and the recognition of the unique individuality of each person, while the former treats a child as a lifestyle accessory, one who should be grateful for the honor of being conjured into existence.
During a recent podcast with Jesuit Fr. Robert McTeigue on The Station of the Cross Catholic Media, Them Before Us Engagement Director Patience Sunne acknowledged that some children are deprived of their mother and father because of difficult circumstances, such as a newborn baby being given up for adoption by a teen mom. Although many of these children wind up in stable homes, they have a statistically higher rate of emotional difficulties than those raised by their natural, married parents. Recent research into this phenomenon has motivated concerned parents and professionals to address the psychological trauma associated with early parental loss.
Children born through surrogacy, Sunne opined, experience a different kind of desolation: they are not given the option of expressing their loss, although they have faced significant trauma as well. Draconian contract provisions that mandate the handoff of a newborn to the preemptive parents directly after birth violently snap a bond that has been crafted in the womb for months of gestation. If such a child suffers from disordered attachment later in life, he may hear Mom and Dad declare in soothing voices, “But you were so wanted.” Showered with attention and love, he may feel that he has no right to feel deprived, let alone to express it. Furthermore, as the child grows and encounters facts about the process of IVF, he may begin to wonder whether some of his siblings are in suspended animation as frozen embryos, or whether they ended up being tossed out as medical waste.
The most scandalous fact about these procedures is that they set out to produce a human being at the whim of biological parents who knowingly plan to withhold the infant’s most pressing physical and emotional needs. Worldwide Surrogacy Specialists, the LGBT-owned company that West contracted with, operates a special service to gay couples called “Men Having Babies,” legitimizing a doctrine of parenthood that utterly rejects children’s right to the maternal care that no male, however tender and well-intentioned, is biologically wired to provide. Another WSS webpage features a gushing testimonial in praise of an agency case manager who reportedly “had the best interest in mind for both of us” (that is, the surrogate and the intended parents). The child in the picture, sadly, did not make the cut.
Provision 8 of the contract signed by McKenna West takes this madness a step further, characterizing the “best interests of the Child” as enabling the “Intended Parents to exercise all of their rights and privileges [my emphasis] from the moment of birth” and then stipulating, “The Gestational Carrier will not nurse the Child unless otherwise agreed to, in writing, by the Parties.” Perhaps the ailing baby West brought into the world might not have been strong enough to breastfeed, but the restraining order may have denied him access to another vital connection that the surrogate could have provided. Recent research has raised strong evidence that babies with HLHS benefit significantly from maternal skin-on-skin contact, also known as kangaroo care, which has been shown to stabilize heart rates and lower infant stress. Sadly, the baby never received this comforting attention.
Perhaps no one knows the price of surrogacy more intimately than McKenna West, who experienced a front-row demonstration of the cruelty inflicted on society’s most vulnerable human beings by this barbaric industry:
| It wasn’t something that had really crossed my mind going into this…Now, fighting for his life and protecting him, I realize I am all he knows. And even though he’s not biologically mine, he knows me, and to him I am his mother. I’m the one who’s been carrying him and nurturing him, and it’s my heartbeat that he hears…it’s changed my view on the damage, the potential damage, that can be caused by giving these babies away from the only comfort that they’ve known, and doing it intentionally. |
On September 9, West’s legal team, anchored by Alliance Defending Freedom, asked the United States Supreme Court to impose a stay on the California decision which had awarded parental rights to Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed. West’s lawyers maintained that the woman who had refused to countenance the killing of a baby with a treatable health condition still deserved a seat at the table. Their petition echoed a concern frequently voiced by the surrogate herself since her summary exclusion from the life of “Baby G.” following his August 12 birth—that the legally recognized parents will transfer him to California hospice care before the wheels of the law can grind into action to save him.
The flagrant abuse of personal freedom common to surrogacy and all other forms of IVF has spawned, in only a few decades, catastrophic personal and societal consequences. Only when the legal definition of parenthood echoes the reality written into our human biology will the disturbing trend be rectified. Asking questions about the deeper implications of these reproductive technologies is a good first step; thanks to the courage of a young Alaskan surrogate, and the grit of those who have catapulted her into the public eye, this conversation is capturing the attention of millions.
