California’s Surrogacy Laws Are Not Pro-Family
California is considered the most “surrogacy-friendly” state in the nation. Why? The proof is in our laws! Our state has created strong legal protections around surrogacy and has even streamlined the process.
On the surface, that sounds compassionate and family-friendly; it sounds like California is doing everything it can to help people build families! But does being “surrogacy-friendly” actually mean California is pro-family? Most importantly, does it mean the interests of the most vulnerable person in the entire arrangement – the child – are being put first?
A current court battle that has captured national attention is exposing some deeply uncomfortable contradictions in California's approach to surrogacy. What happens when the legal rights California gives to intended parents collide with the rights California gives to pregnant women? What happens when a surrogacy contract says one thing, but the woman carrying the baby says another?
That's where this story gets complicated, and that's where we need to start asking whether California's surrogacy laws are really designed to protect families…or to protect the adults who want to create them at all costs.
Why This Case Matters for California
There is a recent story that has just exploded in the news that has put surrogacy, parental rights, and abortion laws at the center of the national conversation. I am sure you have heard of the situation of McKenna West – the surrogate mother who refused to abort the child she was carrying, against the wishes of the biological parents, and is now fighting in court for his ongoing protection and care. BUT what you may not have heard about this case is that the couple who are the biological parents of this child are from Los Angeles, California – and both our state’s surrogacy and abortion laws play a complicated, but important role in how the situation has unfolded.
In case you haven’t heard what has been going on, I am going to break it down for you. But I want to note why this is important for us to talk about. This is NOT just a one-off, bizarre custody battle involving one surrogate, one couple, and one baby. This case should force us to confront what happens when some of the most strongly held principles in California law collide with each other.
California wants to be a state where people have broad freedom to make “reproductive choices.” It wants to protect abortion through all nine months of pregnancy in the name of bodily autonomy. It also wants to be the most surrogacy-friendly state in the country, protecting the right of intended parents to have children through surrogacy. But those principles can and do come into conflict. What happens when the people who intended to be a child's parents want one thing, while the woman carrying that child wants another? What happens when the child – the person who has absolutely no say in any of these decisions – is caught in the middle in a literal life or death scenario?
The truth is that California has created laws around all these issues, and when those laws collide in a real-life situation involving a vulnerable child, we're forced to confront if those laws are philosophically consistent and morally good. Are they protecting families? Are they protecting women? Most importantly, are they protecting children?
The Story of McKenna West & Baby Gabriel
To answer those questions, we first have to understand what happened. So, let's start from the beginning.
Los Angeles couple Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed turned to surrogacy after eight failed rounds of IVF and a medically necessary hysterectomy. Surrogacy, she said, was “not my first choice, it was my only option” to have a child genetically related to her and her husband.[1]
In August 2025, they were matched with McKenna West, a 28-year-old cardiac nurse and single mother of two.[2] At first, everything went well. The three developed a close relationship, and McKenna became pregnant with the couple's embryo in December 2025.[3]
But at 20 weeks, doctors discovered that the baby boy had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a severe heart defect. Their surrogacy agreement contained a provision allowing the intended parents to terminate the pregnancy in the event of certain fetal abnormalities.[4] So, after eight rounds of IVF and finally achieving a successful pregnancy, the couple asked McKenna to abort their baby.
McKenna couldn't do it. She initially scheduled an abortion for 23 weeks, but says she felt trapped by the contract and, ultimately, couldn't bring herself to go through with it. She believed the baby had a chance at life and decided she would do everything she could to protect him and get him the medical care he needed.[5]
That decision changed everything. The relationship between McKenna and the couple deteriorated. Lawyers became involved, the couple threatened to sue her for breach of contract, and McKenna ultimately left California for Texas, where she believed the state's abortion laws would protect her ability to continue the pregnancy. On August 12, 2026, McKenna gave birth in Texas to the baby boy she calls Gabriel – meaning “God is my strength.” The case quickly became a national story, with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton intervening to seek life-saving medical care for the child and prevent him from being taken out of state.[6]
Today, the child is in the custody of Nausheen and Omar, and has undergone one of multiple heart surgeries necessary to treat his condition. The couple obtained a restraining order against McKenna, barring her from seeing or holding the baby. California courts have ruled that McKenna has no rights to legal or physical custody of the child.[7] And the couple is currently suing McKenna for $100,000 in damages for giving birth to their son.[8]
Five Pitfalls in California’s Surrogacy Laws
There are a lot of disturbing facts in this case, but the biggest point I want us to understand is this: our laws in California make a scenario like this possible – and in some ways, they actually encourage it. What do I mean by that?
First, California allows parenthood to be separated from both biology and birth.
Under California's surrogacy laws, the woman who gives birth to a child does not have any parental rights to that child. The intended parents can be established as the legal parents through a surrogacy agreement and court process, even though another woman carried and gave birth to the baby. That was the premise of McKenna's arrangement from the very beginning.
Now, this is not specific to California. This is true of surrogacy in general – something California did not create as a concept. But where California does stand out is in how explicitly and comprehensively it has built that separation into its family law. California's courts say plainly that in a gestational-surrogacy case – meaning a situation where a surrogate is used to give birth to another couple’s embryo, not using her own egg – the involved parties can use the surrogacy agreement as the basis for a court judgment identifying the child's legal parents.
That is what happened in this case. Before this little boy was even conceived, the adults had already entered into a contract determining who his parents would be – and that contract is now being used, despite everything that has transpired, to enforce that Nausheen and Omar are the ones with right to the child. This differs from other states, which actually require adoption for children born via a surrogate, if the intended parents are not genetically related to the child. So, for instance, if a couple used egg and sperm donors to create the embryo that was then born via a surrogate, the intended parents would have no genetic connection to the child and would not be legally considered the child’s parents except for going through the process of adoption.
But California has no such exceptions or provisions. California has statutorily codified that you can establish parenthood through a contract. California has created a specific judicial process to establish intended parents as legal parents without even needing a court hearing. California explicitly recognizes that a surrogate who gives birth is not necessarily the legal parent, separating parenthood from birth.
Why is this important? States that require something like adoption have an inherent recognition that parenthood is not something adults can simply manufacture through a contract but is a biological reality that cannot be escaped. Adoption recognizes that child DOES have a biological connection to the woman who gave birth to him/her, and if someone else is going to assume legal parenthood, there is a legal process designed to make sure that transfer is in the child's best interest.
This inevitably opens us to a broader conversation about surrogacy. To that, I would say that parenthood is not merely a legal status that adults can assign to themselves by contract. It is rooted in biological realities – genetic parentage and the biological relationship created through pregnancy and birth. In a gestational surrogacy arrangement, those biological realities are intentionally separated. The people who provide the egg and sperm may be the child's genetic parents, while another woman carries and gives birth to the child. That doesn't mean the surrogate is genetically the child's mother, but it does mean she is biologically connected to that child in a way that a contract cannot simply erase.
Through surrogacy, we have taken one of the most basic biological realities in human life – the woman who carries and gives birth to a child is his mother – and created a legal system where that reality can be intentionally separated from legal parenthood. I think that is both morally wrong and deeply troubling from a scientific perspective. Pregnancy is not simply a service that happens to take place inside a woman's body. The mother and child are biologically connected throughout pregnancy. The mother's body sustains, nourishes, protects, and communicates with the developing child. But California's legal framework can treat that biological relationship as something that can be contractually separated from motherhood.
Law should recognize a pre-existing biological relationship rather than pretending parenthood is something adults can simply manufacture or assign by agreement. Biological realities create relationships and responsibilities that exist before the government ever issues a birth certificate. This becomes especially important when the adults in the contract disagree – because you need something outside of their competing preferences to tell you what is true and what is right. When the law separates legal parenthood from biological reality, it creates a dangerous situation because, when the adults' interests eventually conflict, the law has already removed the most objective foundation for determining what the parent-child relationship actually is.
If parenthood is something adults can establish by contract, then the child can begin to look less like a person who exists independently of the adults' wishes and more like the intended result of an agreement between adults.
Second, California allows contracts to reach into the most intimate questions surrounding a child's humanity.
In McKenna's case, the contract contained a provision allowing the intended parents to terminate the pregnancy if fetal abnormalities were discovered. Why in the world is that something we are comfortable putting into a legally binding contract?! We aren't talking about a contract to renovate a kitchen or purchase a house. We're talking about a contract that governs what happens to a human being because of a disability or medical diagnosis.
This story should force us to confront an uncomfortable word that we don't like to use in the context of fertility treatments and family planning: eugenics. If a child is considered acceptable when he is healthy, but disposable when he has a serious abnormality or disability, what exactly are we saying about the value of that child's life? We are saying, in effect, you as an intended parent are allowed to only value the child you are creating if that child meets your standards – if they are in perfect health, or are the right gender, or wouldn’t create any complications for you that you might see as a burden to your life. That’s wrong! That should never be allowed. Contracts should never determine personhood or worth.
Additionally, who represents the baby in this contract? The intended parents have lawyers, the surrogate has lawyers – they both get a voice in the contract. But the child, the most vulnerable person in the entire arrangement, has no voice and no representative sitting at the table advocating for them. Who will stand up for the baby to say certain treatment is wrong, and they should be protected?
Adults are allowed to make legally enforceable decisions about the circumstances under which an unborn child’s life will continue, while the child has absolutely no say in the matter.
Third, California's commitment to bodily autonomy becomes incredibly inconsistent when it comes to surrogacy.
This, to me, is the biggest philosophical problem with the entire system. California ferociously, unashamedly advocates that for women, it’s “their body, their choice.”
Okay, so then how does surrogacy work? A surrogate is literally entering into a contract governing what she will do with her body throughout an entire pregnancy. Yet, we recognize that not every provision of that contract is going to be physically enforceable – because a contract cannot forcibly require a woman to undergo an abortion against her will. An abortion, especially late in pregnancy, is an incredibly invasive, physically and emotionally serious medical procedure. How could the state possibly say that a woman has the right to make her own reproductive decisions, but then tell a surrogate, “Well, you signed a contract, so now you have to do this”? That is not bodily autonomy.
So then, if that provision isn't actually enforceable, then why put it in the contract at all? What purpose does it serve? At the very least, it creates leverage. It can frighten a woman into believing that if she refuses, she will be sued – as McKenna now is.
You cannot simultaneously say that a woman's body belongs entirely to her and that another adult has a contractual right to dictate what happens to her body. Those two principles are fundamentally in tension.
Fourth, California's framework does not treat a parent's willingness to end their child's life as disqualifying them from parenthood.
This is where this case becomes impossible to comprehend. At the recent court hearing about McKenna’s case, Nausheen was asked whether she would trust someone to care for her child if that person wanted her child dead. Surprise, surprise: she couldn't answer. She admitted she didn’t know what to say. But that's a fundamentally important question!
Nausheen and Omar are the genetic parents of this baby. But they disqualified themselves from being his parents the moment they decided that his life was no longer worth fighting for. Their son had been diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. That is a serious condition, it requires major medical intervention – but it is not a death sentence. Children with HLHS can and do survive with treatment.
Their response to that diagnosis was not to ask what could possibly be done to save their son. Which, we need to understand, a LOT can be done to save him! Babies who undergo the first medically necessary surgery for this condition have a 70% survival rate, and children who survive to 12 months old have a long-term survival rate of 90%.[9] This is in NO way a death sentence!
But instead, their response was to immediately end the pregnancy. Think of that – ending his life, when he has well above a 50% chance at life when given the right medical care. Is that not insane?
To really understand the gravity of this, we need to be honest about what an abortion at 23 weeks – which was how far along McKenna was when the abortion was scheduled – means. This isn't some abstract medical term like “termination of pregnancy.” At that stage, this is a developed human baby who is nearly halfway through the second half of pregnancy. The baby is surely kicking by this point (which is being felt by the woman), the baby’s nervous system is developed enough to feel pain in the womb, and the baby is just one week away from reaching the point when almost all babies can survive outside the womb if given proper support.[10]
Abortion this far along would require a dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedure. The abortionist would first use something called laminaria – a form of sterilized seaweed – to soak up liquid from the woman’s body and expand her cervix (aka dilation). This would be the first step, taking 24-48 hours. The woman would then return to the abortion clinic and be put under anesthesia while the abortionist uses metal dilators and a speculum to further open the cervix. Once the dilation is complete, the abortionist will use a suction catheter to empty the uterus of all amniotic fluid.
Then comes the most gruesome part of the procedure. The abortionist uses a grasping instrument with rows of sharp “teeth” to grab and pull the baby’s arms and legs, tearing the limbs from the child’s body. The abortionist continues to grasp intestines, spine, heart, lungs, and any other limbs or body parts. The most difficult part of the procedure is usually finding, grasping and crushing the baby’s head. After removing pieces of the child’s skull, the abortionist uses a curette to scrape the uterus and remove the placenta and any remaining parts of the baby.
Lastly, the abortionist collects all the baby’s body parts and reassembles them to make sure there are two arms, two legs, and that all of the pieces have been removed.[11] This is what McKenna was being asked to consent to for the little boy growing inside of her. This is what Nausheen and Omar desired for their child.
Praise God that McKenna said no, and chose to carry and protect him instead. But what is so backwards is that somehow, the law requires that the people who would have chosen for their son to be torn limb from limb have full custody of him, while the woman who fought to keep this baby alive is the one being treated as the problem. The people who wanted him aborted are saying that they love him more and should have the legal authority to decide what happens to him.
I cannot make that make sense. But this is where we have to be willing to call out what has happened in California for what it is: a culture of death. We have become so committed to the idea that adults should have complete control over reproduction that we have stopped asking what that freedom means for the most vulnerable human being involved.
Which leads to my last point: California has created a culture where children can become commodities to be created, contracted for, and discarded at the whim of adults.
At what point in the process did Nausheen and Omar stop to ask what is best for the child? The answer is, at no point! Everything centered around the desires of adults. When those desires were not met, those adults went further and further outside the bounds of what biology naturally allows to fulfill those desires. But that is a dangerous principle to live by, because it inevitably leads to seeing children as a means to fulfilling whatever you want, which means they are no longer human beings with their own rights, worthy of decisions being made that are best for THEM.
But children are not products. They are not commodities. They are not something adults are entitled to manufacture simply because they desperately want them! Our laws must protect the most vulnerable member of the family, not just the adults who want to create that family.
This is controversial, even among conservatives. This take is not popular – because the desire for children is so strong, and is such a good desire. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Nausheen and Omar wanting a child. There is nothing wrong with pursuing medical paths to understand what is going on, if there are medicines or remedies or treatments that can help to facilitate that. But, when it comes to something like surrogacy, I think we need to set aside our intense emotions about having children, and be grounded in principles of right and wrong.
There is a fantastic book called The Desecration of Man by Carl Trueman that sums up perfectly what I believe we need to consider in our culture today. He writes, “…with infertile couples, the question is not whether these procedures bring happiness to those involved; it is whether the underlying shifts in the way society thinks about children are ultimately dehumanizing.” He goes on to say, “The question is not whether the desire is legitimate but whether the fulfillment of it through any technological means necessary will lead to a transformation of the way society as a whole thinks of children.”[12]
The desire for a child can be good, and still not justify everything we are willing to do to get one. We have to be willing to ask whether, in our attempts to overcome infertility and fulfill a very legitimate desire for children, we are actually beginning to change the way we understand children themselves. Christians, of all people, should be willing to stop and ask that question, even when the answer is uncomfortable, even when the desire behind it is beautiful, and even when taking that position means pushing back against something that has become increasingly accepted in our own political movement.
A good desire does not make every means of fulfilling it good. If we really love children, then we have to be willing to ask not only how badly we want them, but what our pursuit of them says about their humanity and ours.
What is at Stake for California
The real issue at stake is not is simply whether McKenna West broke a contract, or which parent the baby belongs to, or what should happen in surrogacy contracts. This case is important because it exposes the way our culture increasingly thinks about children.
Children are gifts, not possessions and not something we are even entitled to have. A child has inherent dignity because he is a human being. Children are fellow image-bearers, which means their value doesn't come from what they can do for us. It doesn't come from their health, it doesn't come from their abilities, it doesn't come from whether we planned for them, and it certainly doesn't disappear when they are diagnosed with a disability.
Which means that, for our state, if we want to build laws that are truly pro-family, we cannot be so consumed with the rights of people who desire to be parents, but we instead have to ask, in every scenario, what does justice require for the child involved?
Our state has been headed down the wrong path for far too long. But just because our laws have entrenched such a harmful view of children does not mean that we can become numb to it. Stories like McKenna’s matter, because the lives, people, and children involved matter. It is time for our state to wake up out of its stupor on this and change course. It is time for California to remember that children are not commodities, and that every human life bears the image of God and is worthy of protection.
References:
[1] Canon, Gabrielle. “Baby With Rare Heart Defect at Center of Surrogacy Case in Critical Condition.” The Guardian, August 27, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/26/baby-surrogacy-case-critical-condition.
[2] Spector, David. “Surrogate Fighting for Baby’s Life Against Abortion-pushing Biological Parents: ‘Every Life Matters.’” New York Post, August 1, 2026. https://nypost.com/2026/08/01/us-news/surrogate-fights-biological-parents-to-save-baby-lawsuit/.
[3] Osibamowo, Toluwani. “What We Learned at Tuesday’s Tense, Tearful Dallas Hearing Over Alaska-California Surrogacy Battle.” KERA News, August 26, 2026. https://www.keranews.org/government/2026-08-26/mckenna-west-surrogacy-case-dallas-texas-alaska-california.
[4] Reilly, Patrick. “Biological Parents Sue Surrogate McKenna West for $100K for Breaching Contract, Not Aborting Baby.” New York Post, August 19, 2026. https://nypost.com/2026/08/19/us-news/biological-parents-sue-surrogate-mckenna-west-for-100k-for-breaching-contract-not-aborting-baby/.
[5] Live Action. “Couple Sues Surrogate Who Refused to Abort,” August 10, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DONYp5LWqgc.
[6] Ede-Osifo, Uwa. “Surrogate Mother Who Fled to Texas Gives Birth to Baby With Severe Heart Defect.” The Guardian, August 14, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/12/surrogate-mother-texas-gives-birth.
[7] The Associated Press. “California Couple Confront Their Surrogate in a Texas Court as Dispute Over Newborn Escalates.” NBC News, August 27, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-couple-confront-surrogate-texas-court-dispute-newborn-escal-rcna594476.
[8] Reilly, “Biological Parents Sue Surrogate McKenna West for $100K for Breaching Contract, Not Aborting Baby.”
[9] Seattle Children’s Hospital. “Baby Battles Fatal Heart Condition and Comes Out Unstoppable,” May 9, 2024. https://www.seattlechildrens.org/healthy-tides/hlhs-doesnt-stop-nevaeh/.
[10] Live Action, “D&E Abortion FAQs,” n.d., https://www.liveaction.org/what-is-abortion.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Trueman, Carl. The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity. Penguin Group, 2026.
