A Surrogacy Dispute Across Three States: What Happens When the Surrogate Crosses State Lines
A two-day-old infant born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome — a severe congenital heart defect where the left side of the heart is underdeveloped — has been placed in the physical custody of his biological parents, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed of California, while receiving specialized medical care at a tertiary care center, according to the parents' attorney Lee Budner (The Guardian, 2026-08-14). The baby, born on Wednesday to surrogate mother McKenna West of Alaska, sits at the center of a multi-state surrogacy dispute that drew intervention from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and raised unresolved questions about parental rights, bodily autonomy, and the jurisdictional reach of surrogacy contracts.
West agreed to serve as a surrogate for Gilkar and Ahmed the previous year. After prenatal testing revealed the fetus had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, the parties' accounts diverge sharply. West reportedly refused requests from the biological parents to terminate the pregnancy — requests that Gilkar and Ahmed's legal team has categorically denied making (The Guardian, 2026-08-14; Texas Tribune, 2026-08-12). According to an earlier Guardian report, West initially agreed to an abortion after the diagnosis but then reversed course (The Guardian, 2026-08-13). West has stated that during early conversations facilitated by a surrogacy agency, the couple indicated that "if something came up … termination would not be their first choice" (The Guardian, 2026-08-14).
Court documents in the dispute were filed on July 20, 2026, in Alaska, where West resides (Texas Tribune, 2026-08-12). After her initial agreement to terminate the pregnancy, West traveled to Dallas County, Texas, a state where abortion is legally restricted, and broke contact with the biological parents (The Guardian, 2026-08-13). West said she traveled to Texas both for legal protection and to ensure the child could be near physicians experienced in treating his cardiac condition (The Guardian, 2026-08-14).
Paxton intervened in the case seeking to guarantee that the infant, whom he referred to as "Baby Gabriel," received life-saving medical treatment over any objections from the intended parents. He secured an emergency court order mandating that hospitals provide such care (The Guardian, 2026-08-14; EWTN News, 2026-08-12). The intervention by a state attorney general into a private surrogacy arrangement between residents of California and Alaska, litigated initially in Alaska, places the dispute at the intersection of competing state legal frameworks governing parentage and reproductive rights.
Budner, representing Gilkar and Ahmed, stated that the couple's son was in their physical custody and receiving expert medical care at a tertiary care center (The Guardian, 2026-08-14). In comments to the Texas Tribune, Budner accused Paxton and West of transforming a family tragedy into "political theater" (Texas Tribune, 2026-08-12).
West has been denied contact with the child since the custody transfer. Her attorney, Lincoln Davis Wilson, said she intends to continue legal efforts to gain custody and is challenging the orders of parentage — the legal documents that establish who a child's parents are. Wilson's argument rests on the claim that under Texas law, a woman who gives birth to a child is the legal mother of that child (The Guardian, 2026-08-14). That legal theory, if pursued through Texas courts, would directly test the enforceability of surrogacy contracts executed in other states against Texas's statutory framework, which does not recognize gestational surrogacy agreements in the same manner as California or Alaska.
West has also spoken publicly about the case, telling the anti-abortion outlet Live Action that it was "scary" to think that she, as the one giving birth, might not be able to make a decision about the child's treatment (The Guardian, 2026-08-14). She also appeared on the Megyn Kelly podcast, where she discussed her version of early conversations with the couple (The Guardian, 2026-08-14).
The broader context here involves a surrogacy arrangement that spans three states with materially different legal regimes. California has well-established statutory and case-law frameworks recognizing intended parents' rights in gestational surrogacy agreements — arrangements in which a woman carries a pregnancy created from another couple's genetic material. Alaska's surrogacy statutes are less developed. Texas, while permitting gestational surrogacy under certain conditions, also has a statutory default that the woman who gives birth is the legal mother absent a court-validated surrogacy contract. The dispute therefore tests what happens when a surrogate crosses state lines mid-pregnancy, taking the gestational carrier's legal relationship to the child into a jurisdiction that may not honor the original surrogacy agreement.
Paxton's intervention adds a further layer. By securing an emergency order focused specifically on the infant's medical treatment, he sidestepped the threshold parentage question and framed the state's interest in terms of protecting a newborn's right to care. The biological parents' custody, confirmed by their attorney, suggests the court has recognized at least their temporary physical custodial rights. But West's challenge to the parentage orders signals that the question of legal parentage remains unsettled.
For practitioners in assisted reproductive technology law, the case highlights the vulnerability of interstate surrogacy contracts when a surrogate relocates to a jurisdiction with different parentage defaults. It also raises the question of whether a state attorney general's office can, through emergency medical-care orders, effectively determine the trajectory of a custody dispute before parentage is fully adjudicated — that is, before a court has made a final ruling on who the child's legal parents are. The outcome of West's parentage challenge in Texas courts may set a precedent with implications well beyond this case.
