surrogacy

Update: Baby Gabriel Survives First Heart Surgery; Biological Parents Sue Surrogate

Baby Gabriel is alive and recovering from his first major heart surgery in his biological parents’ custody while they sue the surrogate who refused to abort him.

The case captured national attention when it broke about two weeks ago, raising serious questions about IVF, commercial surrogacy and what happens when adults disagree about whether a child should be given the chance to live.

Baby Gabriel was born on August 12, 2026, in Dallas after McKenna West, an Alaskan surrogate, refused the intended parents’ request to abort him.

McKenna says the intended parents, a California couple now identified as Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, told her to abort the baby after he was diagnosed with a serious but treatable heart condition. The heart defect was discovered at McKenna’s 20-week ultrasound.

McKenna refused and instead traveled to Texas, where heart specialists could provide Gabriel with the life-sustaining medical care he would need after birth.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stepped in on behalf of McKenna and Gabriel, asking a Texas court to issue an emergency order providing special protection for Gabriel as soon as he was born.

The court agreed and issued the order on August 11. Gabriel was born the following day.

But Gabriel’s birth did not end the complicated legal battle — or the moral dilemma surrounding his case.

The intended parents currently have custody of baby Gabriel, whom they call Rumi.

A Texas court has issued a temporary restraining order against McKenna, preventing her from contacting Gabriel. 

McKenna, meanwhile, continues to fight for custody of Gabriel, arguing that because she gave birth to him in the state of Texas, she has parental rights under Texas law.

The next hearing in the custody case is scheduled for August 25.

At the same time, the California couple has filed a lawsuit against McKenna for more than $100,000 for breach of their surrogacy contract — including for failing to abort Gabriel.  

On Monday, Gabriel overcame his first major health hurdle and had his first heart surgery. He could need as many as three over the next several years.

For now, a Texas protection order will keep baby Gabriel in Texas where he can continue receiving care from specialists who can treat his heart condition.

Gabriel’s case continues to expose some of the most troubling realities surrounding commercial IVF and surrogacy.

It seems almost unconscionable that the same two people who were advocating for Gabriel’s death last week now have custody. How can they be trusted with his ongoing care and well-being?

The value of human life is not dependent on ability, diagnosis, dependency or adult expectations. 

Babies are not property. They are human beings with human rights, and they deserve protection under the law.

The Daily Citizen will continue to follow this developing story.

Related articles and resources:

Baby Gabriel Born as Texas Court Issues Order Protecting His Chance at Life

Alaska Surrogate Battles to Keep Baby After Abortion Demand

Perspectives on Surrogate Motherhood

What Does The Bible Say About Surrogacy?

Breaking: Baby Gabriel Born as Texas Court Issues Order Protecting His Chance at Life

There’s a major update in the case of Alaska surrogate McKenna West and baby Gabriel. Baby Gabriel has just been born as a court in Texas orders that he receive life-sustaining medical care.

As previously reported by the Daily Citizen, McKenna has been fighting to save Gabriel’s life after his biological parents told her to abort him when he was diagnosed with a serious but treatable heart condition that requires surgery after birth.   

McKenna refused to get an abortion. 

Now, she’s in Texas and Attorney General Ken Paxton has stepped in to help her and Gabriel. 

On Monday, August 10th, AG Paxton intervened in the case, filing a 58-page brief, requesting the court to grant life-sustaining medical treatment to Gabriel following his birth. 

Tuesday, August 11th, the court granted the request. 

Baby Gabriel was born on Wednesday, August 12, 2026, and has been admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit where he will receive life-sustaining heart surgery at a hospital that has a 100% success rate in performing this procedure.

Under the court order, doctors must provide Gabriel with medically necessary stabilizing and life-saving medical care.

The court also decided that Texas law will govern Gabriel’s protection and medical decision-making. Though it was unwilling to allow Texas law to govern his parentage.

The court appointed a guardian ad litem – a neutral person to protect Gabriel’s interests and represent him in ongoing decision making. 

Importantly, the court held that once Gabriel is born, he cannot be removed from the state of Texas, discharged from the hospital or transferred to another medical facility unless for medical necessary care.

The order also addressed what will happen if someone refuses to consent to treatment that doctors believe Gabriel needs. According to the order, if there is a refusal to consent to medically necessary treatment, the court will hold an emergency hearing within two hours of notification and will determine whether they can override the refusal based on the evidence.

Gabriel’s story highlights one of the most serious problems with commercialized surrogacy and IVF — the disconnect between intentionally creating human life and then accepting that child when things don’t go as planned. 

A baby is not a product that can simply be rejected because of an unexpected diagnosis. 

Gabriel’s life has value regardless of his heart condition. He’s a human being with rights and he deserves to be protected. 

The Daily Citizen will continue to follow this developing story. 

Related articles and resources: 

Alaska Surrogate Battles to Keep Baby After Abortion Demand

Perspectives on Surrogate Motherhood

What Does The Bible Say About Surrogacy?

Why Adoption is Beautiful and Surrogacy Isn’t

Alaska Surrogate Battles to Keep Baby After Abortion Demand

What happens when a surrogate refuses to abort the baby she’s carrying? 

This week, Live Action News released an exclusive interview that shines light on a significant moral dilemma surrounding surrogacy: What happens when motherhood is commercialized, and babies are treated like property that can be discarded through a contract?

Surrogate Backstory

According to Live Action News, McKenna West, an Alaskan nurse and single mom, agreed to become a surrogate for a couple from California to help them experience the gift of a child.

Everything seemed to be going well until the 20-week ultrasound, when doctors diagnosed the baby boy, whom McKenna calls Gabriel, with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a serious congenital heart defect. The diagnosis is life-threatening and requires multiple surgeries between birth and three years of age, but it is treatable. 

According to McKenna and court filings obtained by Live Action News, the couple told her to get an abortion, per the surrogate contract. She refused, and the couple filed a lawsuit against her.

According to court documents, no doctor in Alaska would perform an abortion at 22 weeks, which would have entailed dismembering the baby’s body. 

McKenna says a podcaster friend got in touch with Lila Rose of Live Action, and Lila agreed to help McKenna and her children get to Texas, where heart specialists could save baby Gabriel’s life.

The California couple stopped sending money to McKenna because she refused to abort the baby. They’re now demanding that their money be returned and are seeking additional monetary damages. 

Current Situation

McKenna is now 36 weeks pregnant and in Texas. Gabriel is due September 2, 2026.

In a lawsuit, the California couple is demanding that McKenna travel to California to deliver the baby, where it is unclear if they will provide the medical care that he needs or leave him to die after birth.

McKenna says she is willing to travel to California to deliver Gabriel, but only if they guarantee he will be given the medical assistance he needs to live. According to Live Action News, the California couple has not agreed to this condition.

McKenna has filed for custody of Gabriel so she can authorize doctors to perform life-saving heart surgery after he is born.

Couples seeking surrogates almost always choose to work with gestational surrogates who are not genetically related to the baby, rather than traditional surrogates, to increase their chances of retaining legal authority over the child. 

The legal proceedings are ongoing in Alaska and in California. It’s possible a court in California could determine where McKenna gives birth and what medical team provides care to Gabriel. 

McKenna is being represented by Lincoln Wilson, a former Alliance Defending Freedom attorney who is now a partner at First & Fourteenth PLLC. 

Bigger Picture

Advocates of surrogacy have mostly considered the practice as an act of generosity that helps families have children. There are likely many people who have entered into these agreements with compassionate and sincere intentions to do good. But commercial surrogacy raises significant moral questions that must be addressed. 

What happens when a baby has a disability?

What happens when a baby doesn’t meet the expectations of adults?

What happens when adults disagree about whether the child should have the opportunity to live?

Should a woman be forced to get an abortion?

These might sound like hypothetical questions, but they aren’t for McKenna and baby Gabriel.

For those of us who believe that every human life has inherent dignity and worth, regardless of a diagnosis or disability, this case is a sober reminder of what’s really at stake with IVF and surrogacy. 

It is also a reminder that while contracts might establish legal rights, or attempt to treat children as property, they cannot erase the humanity of a baby. 

The consequences of commercial surrogacy and IVF can literally mean life or death for preborn babies. 

It’s time for all Americans of good will to think clearly and carefully about the negative impacts of commercial surrogacy and IVF. Babies are not products. Parenthood isn’t just a contractual relationship. And the value of human life should never depend on age, location, ability, or dependency. 

The Daily Citizen will continue to follow this developing story.

Related articles and resources:

Perspectives on Surrogate Motherhood

What Does The Bible Say About Surrogacy?

Photo from Live Action.

Guy Benson: Can We Celebrate His Baby News?

Guy Benson, a Fox News political analyst, recently announced he and his “husband,” Adam Wise, are bringing home a newborn baby girl to join the boy they acquired through surrogacy in 2023.

Benson’s celebratory Instagram post shows him and Wise bottle-feeding the newborn, each of them doing so on a hospital bed. The first child, Conrad, was acquired through the two men hiring a surrogate. It is assumed this second child was created and born the same way.

Because neither man is interested in women or motherhood, they had to hire a womb to get the babies they desired. They also paid the child’s mother to relinquish her natural maternal rights. There is no glossing over that blunt fact.

This means both children are being intentionally denied their natural mothers, assuming the biological and gestational mothers are two different women, which they likely are. That is how messed up things get when we redefine what family and parentage are because of the legality of same-sex marriage. Same-sex relationships are human cul-de-sacs. That is not a judgement. It is a fact. They don’t lead anywhere humanly by themselves. They are naturally sterile, non-life-producing.

So, when two (or three+) men want babies, they must go knocking at the door of heterosexuality to obtain the necessary eggs and wombs from women. They pay the woman to relinquish her natural maternal rights to her own child. This is what Guy Benson and Adam Wise did. Lesbians must do the same, further obliterating the importance of fatherhood.

As a result, the children born to such arrangements lose their natural mother or father.  All because some adults want kids in wholly unnatural and problematic ways. Intentionally creating children to deny them their natural mother and father is never ethical. It is never loving. It is never progressive, but regressive. It can never be celebrated or congratulated. Yet, it is now increasingly done to satisfy adult wishes.

This is why no one should ever congratulate any family form that mechanically manufactures children and separates them from the father or mother whose DNA they came from and share. The adults deeply desire a biological connection to their child and spend a small fortune to create that. Yet, they casually deny their child the same. They say biology doesn’t matter … until it does.

Benson, in his announcing Instagram post this week, said, 

She’s here, and she’s perfect. We are blessed and overjoyed to welcome Madison Halsey into the world and into our family. Our hearts are filled to the brim. A baby girl. We are just so thankful.

No doubt she is perfect. All life is worth celebrating. 

But not all human configurations are worthy of the same celebration. Madison is perfect, but she will grow up without a mother. There is nothing “perfect” about that. And she will because two men want it that way. The word for that is “selfish.”

Madison will have no mother to bond with in that special, wholly unique motherly way. Guy can’t do that. Adam cannot. All of the love, care and material resources in the world cannot make either of them a mother. Grandma won’t be able to fully fill that role. Madison is a girl, and she will always wonder who her female parent is. Why? Because seeing one’s similar and distinct image in one’s mother and father is literally one of the most natural human developmental experiences in the world. Benson and Wise have taken that away from Madison and that is nothing to congratulate.

The legalization of same-sex marriage by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2015 created this by radically redefining the family and parentage. The legal innovation of Obergefell v. Hodges de-sexed the family by removing the essential quality of male or female. If the Benson-Wise “family” is just as laudable as the natural male-female family, then the feminine in humanity simply becomes optional, merely preferential like vanilla or chocolate ice cream. It also says designing intentionally motherless and fatherless children is something to celebrate.

Do not miss that the argument for same-sex “marriage” created the de-sexed “same-sex family.” Both are human impossibilities and violations of what it means to be human.

No amount of congratulatory happy talk can mask this fact: Madison is denied her mother because two wealthy men want it that way.

South Dakota Makes Fertility Fraud a Felony

South Dakota legislators passed a bill last week criminalizing fertility fraud.

Fertility fraud, or medical rape, occurs when a fertility doctor secretly replaces the intended father’s sperm with his own or that of another donor’s. South Dakota’s HB 1164 makes fertility fraud a felony and creates a way for victims — including children conceived through fraud and men who involuntarily father children — to sue perpetrators.

The South Dakota House and Senate passed HB 1164 in unanimous votes before Governor Larry Rhoden signed the bill into law on March 10.

Fertility fraud doesn’t just constitute medical rape. It deprives parents of their right to raise their biological children and, conversely, children of their right to be known and loved by their biological parents.

But most American states remain poorly equipped to deal with this and the myriad other ethical problems created by modern fertility technologies. According to the U.S. Donor Conceived Council, more than two-thirds of states still have no legislation explicitly criminalizing fertility fraud.

Indiana became the first state to make fertility fraud illegal in 2019, following the trial of former Indiana fertility doctor Donald Cline.

Cline fathered more than 90 children through medical rape during the 1970’s and 80’s. One of Cline’s sons began unraveling the mystery after an at home DNA test showed he was not related to the man he believed to be his biological father.

Netflix documented Cline’s children’s search for justice in the 2022 documentary Our Father.

When Cline went to trial in 2017, Indiana had no law classifying his conduct as a crime. He pled guilty to felony obstruction of justice and paid a $500 fine.

“The charge silenced [Cline’s victims] when it came to their ability to describe the underlying harm to the court,” Jody Madeira, a professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law and one of the experts who testified against Cline, told Netflix’s Tudum.

“The entire narrative got changed,” Madeira expanded. “It became about Cline lying to the state of Indiana and not about these illicit inseminations, not about the medical rape, not about the harm [and] not about the identity issues.”

Identity issues lie at the heart of all ethical problems arising from the rapid, unregulated expansion of fertility technologies.

The biological ties between parents and children are practically and spiritually crucial to a child’s development and identity formation. That’s why Focus on the Family believes children have the right to be raised by their biological mother and father.

While adoption redeems broken relationships between parents and children, surrogacy intentionally separates children from one or more of their biological parents. Babies conceived through in vitro fertilization frequently suffer the same foundational trauma.

“By making fertility fraud a felony, South Dakota affirms a simple truth: a child’s biological identity isn’t anecdotal or interchangeable,” child advocacy organization Them Before Us noted on X.

“Parentage is critical to a child’s humanity and rights; thus, their genetic origins deserve legal protections.”

The Daily Citizen thanks South Dakota legislators for protecting women’s, parents’ and children’s rights by criminalizing fertility fraud. But children and families still need comprehensive, nation-wide protections from unregulated fertility technologies.

Until all states prioritize children’s rights over adults’ desire for children, crimes and abuses like fertility fraud will continue to occur.

Additional Articles and Resources

Florida to Regulate Surrogacy After Pennsylvania Sex Offender Purchases Baby

Male ‘Throuple’ Buys Toddler from Quebec Government

President Trump Acts to Expand Access to IVF

Why Adoption is Beautiful and Surrogacy Isn’t