A Texas judge has cleared the medically fragile infant to leave the state but the surrogate isn’t done fighting.
Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, a couple from California, hired McKenna West, 28, an Alaska nurse, to carry their child after eight failed IVF rounds and a hysterectomy left them unable to conceive. Around 20 weeks into the pregnancy, doctors diagnosed the unborn baby with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a condition where the left side of the heart is severely underdeveloped. Under their surrogacy agreement, Gilkar and Ahmed asked West to terminate the pregnancy.
West refused. Instead, she traveled to Texas, one of the states with the strictest abortion laws in the country, to give birth. She has said she believed the couple would not pursue life-saving treatment for the baby and wanted to “protect” him.
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton later intervened publicly to ensure the child received medical care after birth. The baby, whom his parents named Rumi and West calls Gabriel, was born on August 12. He has since undergone a complex two-day open-heart surgery, which his parents’ legal team says was delayed because West refused to undergo an amniocentesis that doctors needed to properly plan the procedure.
At one point, according to Gilkar, a feeding tube came loose and the baby stopped breathing, prompting a hospital chaplain to be called.
Speaking in a Dallas courtroom in August, Gilkar broke down describing her son. “He’s the most beautiful person” she’d ever seen, she said, adding: “He’s the love of our lives. He’s suffering a lot.”
The custody fight has sprawled across multiple states and courts. Gilkar and Ahmed have been recognized as Rumi’s legal parents by a California court, a ruling West is still contesting. West, backed by the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, has taken her fight to the US Supreme Court, asking justices to block the California ruling. Her attorneys argue she was unlawfully cut out of decisions about a baby she gave birth to.
The Thursday ruling found that “sustaining the life of the medically fragile child is the paramount concern in this time-sensitive matter,” pointing to testimony from the infant’s Texas physician that the window for an ICU-to-ICU transfer was short and “ripe now.” The ruling gives the green light for the month-old baby to leave Texas for a hospital in Los Angeles.
Gilkar and Ahmed’s lawyers, Adam Wolf and Lee Budner, have fired back, accusing West of “fabricating” an emergency and running a “publicity tour” that risks the baby’s care.
West is also suing the couple for breach of contract after they stopped her surrogate compensation, while a Dallas judge has extended a restraining order against her. The parents have launched a GoFundMe to help cover Rumi’s ongoing medical costs.
The dispute began when West refused the abortion request and fled to Texas, setting up a clash between the surrogate’s religious or moral objections, the parents’ medical decisions, and competing state laws. What started as a contractual disagreement over pregnancy termination has escalated into a federal case with a child’s life in the balance.