The Story of McKenna West Shows the Moral Insanity of Commercial Surrogacy

In case anyone doesn’t think that surrogacy shamelessly commodifies children, exploits women, and is an utterly evil and dehumanizing process, they should pay attention to the story unfolding in Texas with surrogate mother McKenna West and her baby Gabriel.

Originally from Alaska, West was contracted to carry a baby for California couple Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed. At 20 weeks, an ultrasound revealed that the baby had a congenital heart defect that would require immediate medical treatment after his birth. When the intended parents learned about this, they demanded that West abort the baby, evidently not wanting to deal with the hassle of heart surgery. Although contractually obligated to comply with the couple’s demands, West refused to abort Gabriel and sought custody of the baby in an Alaska court, which then punted the matter by redirecting her to a court in California to make the decision.

Desperate, West decided to seek sanctuary in Dallas, Texas. She petitioned the court to remain in the state and find treatment for the baby. Under the direction of Attorney General and U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton, the court granted this request and provided the necessary surgery after birth to keep the baby alive. However, West does not have custody of the baby and has “been forbidden from any contact with the baby after his birth.” Despite wanting to abort their son and even denying him treatment after his birth, Gilkar and Ahmed are presumably still his legal guardians, but they are not allowed to move him out of Texas after he is born.

Although Gabriel will be allowed a chance at life—as of the time of this writing, Gabriel has just been born and is now in the hospital receiving treatment—the questions of where he will live and who will raise him are unresolved: Gilkar and Ahmed have not issued any statements about the court order; West’s brother has reached out to adopt Gabriel; and West has no legal claim to the baby despite gestating him and saving his life. For the time being, Gabriel will spend his first days outside the womb in North Texas as the details about who will raise him are worked out.

While pro-lifers should rightly celebrate this outcome, they should also acknowledge that this happy ending is the exception not the rule. Typically, a surrogate mother will terminate a pregnancy if the intended parents demand it. Worse still, an abortion after 20 weeks is a horribly traumatic procedure for the surrogate. As West described it in court, “doctors would inject the baby with ‘a solution that will stop his heart and then he’ll be literally ripped apart and dismembered as he’s taken from [my] uterus.’”

Even when the pregnancy goes well, the whole transaction is deeply exploitative, which is why poorer countries like India have banned it. Whatever the participants might say, no woman hopes to make her money carrying other people’s children in her womb if she can help it. In the case of West, she was a single mother working as a nurse. She likely needed the money and was told that renting out her womb would be an easy thing to do.

It’s unlikely that she was told of the primal wound she would inflict on the child she was carrying. As child advocate and fellow Federalist contributor Katy Faust explains,

parental separation, at birth or later in life, results in what many adoptees refer to as a primal wound, one which can result in ongoing trust, attachment, and emotional issues. That wound doesn’t magically heal after a child is placed with loving parents.

Furthermore, as West’s story illustrates, the children of surrogacy do not actually have a right to life, nor are they protected from human trafficking. While there are many laws regulating adoption which require extensive screenings of parents to prevent people from buying a child for nefarious purposes, few such laws apply to surrogacy. Anyone with enough money can have a baby without having to show themselves to be responsible adults. Even couples who hoped to kill their adopted baby, like Gilkar and Ahmed, are still somehow able to have custody over the child.

Despite all these evils associated with surrogacy, supporters will still insist on the whitewashed image of a loving, committed couple struggling to conceive and a consenting able-bodied woman happy to help them. There is never any mention of the complications, failures, and the crimes it brings, nor does anyone consider the implications of turning childbirth into a profitable business. Sure, both children and women are instantly objectified, but such concerns should be set aside for a pair of friendly gay guys who are willing to pay top dollar to play pretend.

While heterosexual couples who struggle with infertility really do deserve compassion and support, stories like McKenna West and her baby Gabriel demonstrate that surrogacy is not the way to do this. It makes a morally incoherent mess of bringing children into the world. Babies, even ones with heart defects, deserve to be born of loving parents—not swapped around and discarded like defective merchandise.