A battle over surrogacy and abortion that drew national attention to the birth of a baby in Texas this month became a wrenching courtroom drama in Dallas on Tuesday. Both the biological mother and the surrogate told a judge they cared for the child and argued that they should be deemed the parent.
The question of parentage has become a new flashpoint in what began as a seemingly ordinary surrogacy arrangement between a California couple who had struggled to have a baby on their own and an Alaska nurse who acted as their surrogate.
That arrangement was upended after the fetus was diagnosed with a serious heart condition. Citing a clause in the contract, the couple, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, asked the surrogate, McKenna West, to get an abortion. Ms. West refused. In July, she moved to Texas, and the baby, a boy, was born on Aug. 12. He is in critical condition in a Dallas hospital.
The hearing, which stretched more than four hours, centered on the efforts by Ms. West to gain custody over the baby, a boy who was born with a severe heart condition on Aug. 12. She sought to reverse a ruling by a California court from June that recognized Ms. Gilkar and Mr. Ahmed as the parents.
Fighting back tears, Ms. Gilkar testified that Ms. West had no right to custody of the child. “She’s unstable,” she said. “She’s making us run from state to state.”
Ms. West, in her testimony, said she deserved custody in part because it was her decisions that had ensured that the baby was born at all. “He is here and he has a birthday because of the fight I have put up,” she said.
The judge, Ashley Wysocki, ended the hearing at the Dallas County Courthouse by extending a temporary restraining order while she decides the case. The order bars Ms. West from presenting herself as a parent of the baby.
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The hearing on Tuesday followed an intervention in the case by Mr. Paxton, the attorney general, who had asked for a court order to compel Ms. Gilkar and Mr. Ahmed to provide lifesaving treatments to the baby after its birth. By that point, the couple was already working with a medical team on treatments for the baby.
After the attorney general’s intervention, Judge Wysocki issued an order this month along the lines of what Mr. Paxton had requested, including appointing a guardian to represent the child’s interests before the court. The judge also issued the restraining order for Ms. West.
At several points during Tuesday’s hearing, the child’s guardian, Susan Duesler, was aligned with Mr. Budner in objecting to statements and lines of questioning by the lawyers for Ms. West.
The guardian also said she was upset by statements by Ms. West in the media, such as an opinion essay by Ms. West that was published last week in The New York Post. She asked that the case file be sealed, a request that the judge granted on Tuesday.
Ms. Duesler also offered a medical update on the boy, saying he would be in critical care for at least 30 more days. She said that it would be a “minimum” of three to four weeks before the first heart procedure could be declared a success. She did not object to his eventually being transported out of the state, if medically allowed.
See here and here for the background. I don’t know enough about the law to make any guesses about what will happen in this courtroom, but it’s easy to support Ms. Gilkar and Mr. Ahmed over someone backed by Ken Paxton and a bunch of anti-abortion fanatics. I strongly suspect this will be appealed all the way to SCOTUS one way or the other.
In the meantime, I encourage you to read this Trib story about people who have participated in surrogacy, on both sides of the contract.
In interviews with The Texas Tribune in the weeks following the explosive pushback against surrogacy, surrogates and families who had children from surrogacy have shared that these arrangements have risks but aren’t as rife with problems as state leaders have made them out to be. They see surrogacy as a medical treatment and at times, the only way for couples to have a child after years of mentally and physically draining infertility.
They said there’s opportunities for Texas to sharpen laws to ensure intended parents and surrogates know their rights when entering a contract and that both parties are only subject to the laws of the state where the contract was executed.
They also say that the state should work on ensuring that all surrogacy agencies follow best practices such as matching surrogates and intended parents with shared values — such as agreeing on how religion would play into medical decisions and courses of action during medical emergencies — and providing independent legal representation for surrogates.
But ultimately, they say lawmakers shouldn’t outlaw surrogacy — which accounted for 657 births in Texas in 2025 — because of how important it is for couples who have no other way of building their family.
“It really would be so devastating if they wouldn’t allow surrogacy or they wouldn’t allow IVF, because there are so many women who want to be mothers, who should be mothers, and who would be great mothers, and because they have a medical condition they would not be able to,” said Angie Koriakos, a Dallas mother who had her child through surrogacy.
I don’t know that I would have wanted to go this route if we’d not been able to have children on our own. I probably would have preferred adoption, which is its own set of mess and complication and dead ends and expenses. But as with many other things, I wouldn’t want to deny other people that choice. Read this article and see what you think. The Associated Press has more.