A surrogate mother who fled to Texas rather than abort a baby with a treatable heart defect has taken her fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to stop a California order that could send the infant to hospice care.

McKenna West filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court on September 9, seeking to temporarily block a California court judgment that recognized biological parents Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar as the legal parents of a 4-week-old boy she carried and delivered. The Hill reported that West's attorneys argue the California court lacked jurisdiction over the child, who was born in Dallas on August 12 and has never left Texas.

The filing warns that the boy, whom West named Gabriel, could be moved to California as soon as September 17 and placed in hospice rather than continuing life-saving surgical treatment already underway.

A diagnosis at 20 weeks set a multi-state legal fight in motion

Doctors discovered during pregnancy that Gabriel suffered from hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a severe condition in which the left side of the heart is critically underdeveloped. Breitbart reported that the condition, while serious, is treatable. Physicians recommended three surgeries after birth as the standard course of care.

Ahmed and Gilkar, the California couple who contracted with West as their surrogate, asked her to abort the child after the diagnosis. West refused. In her own words, provided in earlier court proceedings: "Every life matters. No woman should be forced to end the life of the baby she is carrying, including me... Baby Gabriel should receive a chance at life."

West then traveled to Texas, where most abortions are banned, and sought custody and the authority to make medical decisions for the child. That move triggered a legal battle that has now stretched across at least two state court systems and landed on the Supreme Court's emergency docket.

The biological parents pushed back. AP News reported that Gilkar told a Texas court the couple had considered abortion after learning of the diagnosis but later decided to continue the pregnancy. That account sits uneasily beside West's claim, and the earlier reporting, that the couple demanded she terminate.

During an August 25 hearing in Dallas, Gilkar said through tears: "He's our child." Ahmed has maintained the same position throughout.

Texas AG Paxton intervened, then a Texas court reversed course

Before Gabriel's birth, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stepped into the case on West's side. Paxton demanded protection for the surrogate and argued the child should receive medically necessary treatment. A Texas judge ordered the hospital to provide life-saving care, appointed a guardian for the baby, and barred anyone from removing the child from the state.

Paxton framed the stakes bluntly. Just The News reported his statement: "Baby Gabriel deserves a chance at life, and I will not allow anyone to unlawfully deny him medically necessary care."

Gabriel was born August 12 in Dallas. He underwent the first of the three recommended surgeries shortly after birth. AP News reported he was in critical condition with potential complications. The hospital where he was born was not named in court filings, but West's attorney, Lincoln Wilson, told reporters the facility had a 100 percent success rate for the first-stage procedure, known as the Norwood operation.

The Supreme Court has taken on several significant cases in recent terms, but few carry the raw human stakes of a weeks-old infant whose medical future hangs on a jurisdictional question.

Then the legal ground shifted. On September 1, the Texas court recognized a California judgment establishing Ahmed and Gilkar as Gabriel's legal parents. The court dismissed West from the case with prejudice, meaning she cannot refile. West now says she is barred from receiving any information about the child or participating in decisions about his care. AP News reported she is also subject to a restraining order blocking all contact with Gabriel.

West's lawyers argue California had no jurisdiction over a child born in Texas

West's emergency application to the Supreme Court, filed under Docket 26A325, asks the justices to put the California order on hold while she pursues further review. Her attorneys wrote that "the stakes of the decisions below are enormous," arguing West "has been dismissed with prejudice from the Texas proceedings and denied any information about or control over the medically fragile child."

The central legal argument is jurisdictional. West's team contends the California court had no authority over a child who was born in Texas, has been treated in Texas, and has never set foot in California. If the California order stands, West's filing warns, the biological parents could move Gabriel out of state as early as September 17, and place him in hospice care rather than continue the surgical plan his doctors laid out.

Wilson, West's attorney, laid out the Texas-law argument in earlier proceedings. The New York Post reported Wilson saying: "She is seeking parentage of the child because she gave birth in Texas, and in Texas, if you give birth to a child, it's your child."

Wilson also flagged a broader issue in the surrogacy industry. He told reporters that "forced abortion clauses that demand that women have to be required to abort a child at the late term are quite common in surrogacy contracts." Breitbart reported the biological parents had threatened to sue West for $250,000 under just such a clause if she refused to terminate.

The Supreme Court has not yet publicly acted on the emergency application. Whether the justices intervene could determine not only Gabriel's immediate medical future but also how interstate surrogacy disputes are resolved when the birth state and the contracting state reach opposite conclusions. The Court's emergency docket has been active in recent months, and the justices have shown willingness to engage on time-sensitive disputes.

Surrogacy contracts with abortion clauses face a post-Roe reckoning

This case sits at the collision point of surrogacy law, interstate jurisdiction, and the post-Roe legal landscape. West carried a child under a contract with a California couple. When the child was diagnosed with a serious but treatable condition, the couple wanted an abortion. The surrogate refused, moved to a state that bans most abortions, and gave birth in a hospital equipped to treat the baby.

Every step of that sequence raises questions the law has barely begun to answer. Can a surrogacy contract compel a woman to abort? Which state's courts control a child born in one jurisdiction under a contract signed in another? And who decides whether a sick newborn receives surgery or hospice, the birth mother who carried him, the biological parents who paid for the surrogacy, or a judge in a state the child has never visited?

The current composition of the Supreme Court may matter. A bench that has already demonstrated its willingness to revisit foundational questions about life and state authority now faces a case where those questions are not abstract. Gabriel is four weeks old. He has already survived one open-heart surgery. His doctors planned two more.

Whether those surgeries happen may depend on which state's court order the Supreme Court treats as controlling, and how fast the justices act. West's filing puts the deadline at September 17.

Several key facts remain unresolved. The Supreme Court has not indicated whether it will grant West's request. The child's current medical status after his first surgery is unclear from public filings. And the full terms of the surrogacy agreement, including which state's law was meant to govern it, have not been disclosed in the available record. The Court's recent track record on emergency applications suggests the justices are not shy about acting quickly when the facts demand it.

A four-week-old boy in a Texas hospital is alive because a woman refused to end his life and a state stepped in to protect him. If the system now hands him to the people who wanted him gone, the law will have failed the one person in this fight who never had a voice.