Baby born via surrogate can leave Texas for treatment in California, court rules

The Texas-supreme-court" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="206941" data-entity-type="organization">Texas supreme court has decided that the month-old infant that surrogate McKenna West gave birth to can be relocated to Los Angeles, a Thursday ruling that came weeks after a California court had recognized the biological parents’ custody rights.“Sustaining the life of the medically fragile child is the paramount concern in this time-sensitive matter,” the court wrote in a Thursday order, referring to the baby’s rare severe heart defect. West had attempted to block the biological parents from removing the child from Texas and taking him to a hospital in Los Angeles where the couple live.The court cited testimony from the infant’s Texas physician, who described the window for an ICU-to-ICU transfer as short and “ripe now”.West’s attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Thursday ruling.The infant, named Rumi by his biological parents, has hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a condition that impedes blood flow and requires extensive surgery. Without treatment, the defect can be fatal.The condition was detected when the baby was a fetus, prompting California couple Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed to ask that West terminate the pregnancy. West, who resides in Alaska, traveled to Texas, where abortion is illegal, to deliver the child.West and her legal team maintain that the couple attempted to force her into having the procedure, while lawyers for Gilkar and Ahmed say that West initially agreed to the abortion, before blindsiding them with the legal battle for custody.The case has stoked enormous debate around abortion and parental rights, particularly in conservative mediasphere.Texas attorney general Ken Paxton elevated the dispute’s national profile, when he intervened to ensure the baby would receive medical care after his birth.West had appealed to the US supreme court, suggesting Gilkar and Ahmed would put the baby into end-of-life care at a hospice rather than continue treatment for the heart defect.West was seeking to be informed about the baby’s medical status and to “advocate for her rights,” according to court documents.“Ordinarily, MW would have been deemed [the baby’s] mother under Texas law by virtue of giving birth to him. But because of the unlawful California judgment, she has been dismissed with prejudice from the Texas proceedings and denied any information,” West’s lawyers wrote in a court filing, using West’s initials.The couple’s attorneys responded in a court filing saying “there is simply no truth whatsoever” to the hospice claim. They argued that if the court sided with West it would sow confusion over who had authority to dictate and consent to medical decisions for the child.Gilkar told a Dallas court in August that Rumi was “the most beautiful person”.“He’s the love of our lives. He’s suffering a lot,” she said.