The Supreme Court declined to intervene in the case of a surrogate mother who refused to abort a baby diagnosed with a serious heart defect, leaving a California custody order in place and the child in the hands of the biological parents who once sought to end the pregnancy.
Justice Elena Kagan, who handles emergency requests arising from California, denied surrogate McKenna West's appeal on Tuesday without issuing a written explanation. The decision, Fox News reported, effectively ends West's bid to block the biological parents, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, from taking the one-month-old boy to Los Angeles for further treatment of a congenital heart condition.
Kagan did not refer the matter to the full Court. She offered no reasoning, which is customary for such denials. For West, a nurse who carried the child for 37 weeks and fought through multiple courts to keep him, the single-line order closes the most direct path she had left.
The dispute traces back to a surrogacy agreement signed in August 2025 between West and the California-based couple. Ahmed and Gilkar had previously tried in vitro fertilization without success before turning to surrogacy. The contract included a clause allowing termination of the pregnancy in the case of a "fetal abnormality."
At 20 weeks, a fetal anatomy scan revealed the baby had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a severe but treatable congenital defect in which the left side of the heart is critically underdeveloped. Ahmed and Gilkar allegedly requested that West terminate the pregnancy. She refused.
West then fled California for Texas, where she gave birth to the boy in August. She named him Gabriel. The biological parents call him Rumi.
The baby underwent open-heart surgery at a Dallas-area hospital. West's attorney, Lincoln Wilson, told the New York Post the child would need the first of three heart surgeries, the Norwood procedure, at a facility with a 100 percent success rate for the operation. The child is now described as suffering from potential complications related to the surgery.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stepped in on West's behalf, signing an order stating that the child must receive lifesaving care in Texas. But a Texas trial judge ruled against West's argument that she should maintain custody.
Last week, the Texas Supreme Court went further, ruling that the child could be moved to California, where Ahmed and Gilkar had lined up medical care in Los Angeles. That decision set the stage for West's emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which Kagan turned away without comment.
The legal question at the center of the fight is straightforward but unresolved: who is the legal parent? West's attorney argued that under Texas law, the woman who gives birth to a child is the mother. A California court, meanwhile, issued a parentage ruling recognizing Ahmed and Gilkar as the legal guardians, an order Wilson has called "void."
Wilson made clear the fight is not over. "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," he said. "We are taking that challenge up through the California courts, and we'll take it up to the US Supreme Court if we have to."
The Supreme Court's pattern of declining to wade into contentious disputes has drawn attention across the political spectrum. The justices similarly stepped aside when a Catholic mother challenged New York's ban on religious vaccine exemptions, leaving a lower court ruling intact without explanation.
Lawyers for Ahmed and Gilkar pushed back hard against the suggestion that they would neglect the baby. "A right to life is not at issue here," their attorneys argued. The couple told the court they have remained with their son in intensive care and are committed to providing necessary treatment.
West's legal team painted a different picture. Her lawyer claimed she was being denied "control over the medically fragile child" and warned that without judicial intervention, "she will receive no further information about the child she carried for 37 weeks and fought to save."
That framing, a woman who carried a child to term, defied pressure to abort, and now faces permanent separation, has made the case a flashpoint in the broader debate over surrogacy contracts, parental rights, and the legal weight of a birth mother's bond with a child she was paid to carry.
The surrogacy agreement gave the biological parents decision-making authority over abortion. But the question of whether a contract clause can compel a woman to end a pregnancy, or strip her of all parental standing when she refuses, sits in legal territory that courts have been reluctant to settle definitively. The Supreme Court's refusal to engage leaves that ambiguity intact.
That reluctance has become a pattern. The Court has declined to intervene in other high-stakes policy disputes in recent months, leaving lower court rulings to stand without the clarity that only a full hearing could provide.
Kagan's denial does not necessarily exhaust every avenue at the Supreme Court level, but the procedural path forward is steep. West's more immediate fight now moves to the California courts, where Wilson has pledged to challenge the parentage ruling that granted Ahmed and Gilkar legal custody.
The Department of Health and Human Services also entered the picture at one point, warning Texas hospitals against denying lifesaving care to the newborn, though the specifics of that action remain unclear from available court filings and public statements.
What is clear is the human cost. A baby born with a serious heart defect is now at the center of a multi-state legal war. A surrogate who refused to end his life faces the prospect of never seeing him again. And the biological parents who once sought an abortion now say they are committed to his care.
The tension between those positions has drawn scrutiny from observers who question whether courts are equipped to resolve disputes that sit at the intersection of contract law, parental rights, and the most basic questions about who gets to decide whether a child lives.
Ken Paxton tried to keep the child in Texas. The Texas Supreme Court overruled him. The U.S. Supreme Court let that stand. And McKenna West, the woman who carried the baby, refused to abort him, and fought for months to keep him, is running out of courtrooms willing to hear her case.
When a contract says a child can be terminated for a defect, and the woman who refused walks away with nothing, the law may be settled. But the principle is not.
