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Posted on 08/24/2026 10:22:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
On Tuesday, a court in Dallas, Texas will convene to decide the fate of a small baby called Gabriel or Rumi, depending on who you believe his mother is. Gabriel-Rumi is at present a sort of Schrödinger’s baby, suspended between possible futures and suspended also, poor sod, between life and death: born with heart disease, headed now for surgery.
Gabriel-Rumi’s short life has so far been the subject of a media frenzy, for reasons I’ll explain, but should he later look back and be appalled at all the fuss, I’d like him to know what a service he’s already done the world.
The global surrogacy business surges on, valued at almost $40 billion, heading for $300 billion by 2030; an accelerating factory belt of babies commissioned, grown, sold. No one who profits from it wants to pause the gravy train or look too hard for harm. But the case of baby Gabriel-Rumi makes the cost of surrogacy – all surrogacy – painfully clear. Gabriel-Rumi’s biological parents, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, are from California.
They conceived using IVF and decided, for unknown reasons, to use a surrogate. Perhaps Nausheen couldn’t carry the baby, or perhaps, like a growing number of western women, she’d put in the hard yards at the gym, looked hot on her socials and didn’t fancy stretch marks. Some women now use surrogates because they’re freaked out by the thought of labour. ‘Social surrogacy’, it’s called, to distinguish it from the medical sort. Is it morally right to outsource physical pain?
Anyway, for whatever reason Nausheen and Omar contracted Worldwide Surrogacy Specialists LLC, WSS contacted McKenna West, and Gabriel-Rumi was implanted. All was dandy until the 20-week scan when it was discovered that he had a heart condition, hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS), which would require surgery shortly after birth.
At that point, Nausheen and Omar decided to abort, which contractually they had a right to do. McKenna at first agreed and made the appointment, before realising that she couldn’t bring herself to kill the baby. Children with HLHS can lead happy lives and Gabriel deserved a chance, she said, and she offered to have him and bring him up herself.
McKenna didn’t want cash; this wasn’t any sort of shakedown. It was the baby she was thinking of, and at a later stage she offered to give up any parental rights if Nausheen and Omar would agree to the life-saving surgery.
The couple thought it best to kill their son. McKenna was prepared to suffer and to disrupt her existing life in order for him to live. Which woman acted more like a mother? I’m not attacking Nausheen. All over the world mothers abort babies for less serious reasons. But parental love is sacrificial. It was Mc-Kenna who demonstrated that love.
And is it all that surprising? I remember the 20-week scan as a turning point in my own pregnancy. The size, the heartbeat, the obvious life of the baby jolted me into a realisation that here, truly, was another person, and that I loved him and had a duty to care for him. In many ways it was a terrible realisation for a woman as irresponsible as me, and it came with a premonition of all the future worry and grief that love involves. I think of that moment as the beginning of motherhood, and it was entirely bound up with the physical closeness of the baby. Distance allows for denial – in pregnancy as in all manner of other scenarios.
When your aged grandparents are at a distance, for instance, it’s easy to persuade yourself that it’s fine not to visit, less unsettling for them. Up close, the truth outs.
A convenient language has evolved to keep the fiction of uncomplicated surrogacy alive and to persuade us all that you can fracture motherhood: split off the egg from the womb, and the womb from the parenting, with absolutely no harm done. Surrogates are known as ‘gestational carriers’, and like egg donors they’re treated as if they’ve done no more than a regular good turn, given blood maybe. But the difference between Nausheen and McKenna’s reactions to their son’s disease shows how wrongheaded this notion is.
A woman who carries a child isn’t just storage – she’s bonded and the baby feels that bond too. Well, of course it does. The womb is its whole reality. A baby is born already knowing and listening out for a birth mother’s voice, and her smell and her heartbeat – and when it’s deprived of them, it suffers.
We know now that if a baby is parted from his birth mother, he interprets her absence as life-threatening and it triggers an emergency stress response. His cortisol spikes and his blood pressure rises. It’s one of those many biological realities that people who call themselves progressive try to will away.
They insist on ‘bodily autonomy’ and a mother’s right to choose right up to birth, for abortion. But if a surrogate like McKenna wants to save a baby, I wonder, is it still ‘her body, her choice’?
The couple did not take McKenna up on her offer to care for their baby. They insisted on abortion, and so she fled with Gabriel-Rumi on board to Texas, where she felt he was safer. Texas not only bans abortion in almost all circumstances but gives the woman who carries the child, rather than the commissioning parents, the authority to decide on medical care. Gabriel-Rumi was born on 12 August in Dallas, and he owes his life to McKenna West, but even so he may never be allowed to meet her.
Nausheen and Omar are now the baby’s legal parents and they’ve procured a court order preventing McKenna from coming near him. They’re also suing her, seeking up to $250,000 for breach of contract, though I’m not sure where they think she’ll find that sort of money. And who knows, should they win next week’s battle for long-term custody, how they’ll possibly explain to their son why they decided to destroy the woman who saved his life.
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Omar and Nasheen, huh? These are the “parents” who ordered the baby killed. Yep... Well, eff-you Omar and Shasheen. Eff-you, eff the camel y’all rode in on and eff the goat that was following. Gabriel will live a happy life because the woman who carried and birthed him chose the path God set before her and the doctors who were blessed by God with the skills required to heal him.
“Nausheen and Omar are now the baby’s legal parents and they’ve procured a court order preventing McKenna from coming near him.”
That’s some truly obscene sht right there.
What a mess.
Is there a GoFundMe set up to fight the two spawn of Satan that wanted the baby aborted?
If the couple gets custody of the child I pray that some prolife group will monitor this child until he is an independent adult and make sure these two ghouls do not harm him.
Once Nasheen Gilkar and Omar Ahme told McKenna West to kill the child, the contract was dissolved, because you can’t contract a killing.
My wife had heart surgery within days of being born. I know for sure she would have NOT terminated pregnancy if her child had the same situation.
I was kind of surprised to hear this (I assume British) writer refer to this unfortunate baby as a "poor sod". I was under the impression that "sod" was an insulting term, often used as short for "sodomite". I'm not British or an expert in British English, but perhaps it has, or has developed, a broader meaning.
From what I understand the “parents/sponsors” had a contract with a surrogate. Which sounds kinda weird, but OK, let’s give that a whirl.
In that contract they specified that if the kid stayed healthy they would continue to pay and then accept the birth. Unfortunately, the kid went bad in the womb — life limiting if not threatening problem. So, they asked for termination.
So far as I am concerned, that is legally and morally justified. Sad, but let’s be real about the expense of raising even a healthy child.
The surrogate objected and refused. To my mind, the “parents” should have been able to simply walk away — write off the $$.
Now, the nutjobs have jumped in. Like the ones defending that arsehole Mom who strangled her 3 babies.
Butt out. It is none of your business.
You cannot enforce a contract to have the mother kill the baby. See where that gets you in court.
Snip...."Our article “Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?” makes the case for Pharaoh Amenhotep ii as pharaoh of the Exodus. Amenhotep’s great-aunt was a prolific Egyptian princess called Hatshepsut.
This princess was daughter of a pharaoh and wife of a pharaoh—however, she only produced a single female heir (this may explain a desire to adopt a son). Her husband and half-brother, later to become Pharaoh Tuthmose ii, instead produced a male heir through another wife. This heir, Tuthmose iii, began to reign at the age of 2, though due to his age Hatshepsut took control as co-regent and she made herself a fully-fledged pharaoh over Egypt (and one of the most successful, at that)."
Sir William Flinders Petrie (the “father of Egyptian archaeology”) noted that Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s “activity seems to have been entirely given to peaceful enterprises,” in “an age of tranquility to the realm” (A History of Egypt, Vol. ii). One remarkable inscription on the facade of her temple at Speos Artemidos reads, in part: “my spirits inclined toward foreign people … the people Roshau and Iuu did not hide themselves from me.” Another inscription describes a “heart full of love.” These extraordinary sentiments would fit well with the biblical description of a “pharaoh’s daughter” who adopted a foreign child."
Rush...rough recollection...
“Those promoting abortion have already been born”.
I agree; at least before the days of woke, our courts traditionally held that you can't expect a court to enforce an illicit act just because there is a contract.
However, this case is complex because the prospective parents are from California where abortion is legal, the mother is from Alaska where it's also legal, but she fled to Texas where abortion is illegal. That move may have protected the baby long enough to be born; but now this mess.
One other surrogacy case from the 90s perhaps was about the mother not wanting to relinquish the baby, and I think she lost that. But this case will hinge on whether a contract abortion is defensible if the mother reneges. "Her body, her choice" and all.
We're about to find out if the court of venue decides that the right to compel an abortion is the more important value than the right to life of a human baby.
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