A California couple went to court this week to reclaim a baby they once contracted to have killed — and the surrogacy industry's dirty secret is on full display.
This is the logical endpoint of treating children as products and women as rented wombs. When you buy a baby and it arrives "defective," the contract says you can send it back — by which the industry means destroy it in utero. The fight between Nausheen Gilkar and surrogate McKenna West isn't a tragic anomaly. It's the system working exactly as designed.
Gilkar and her partner hired West, a 28-year-old nurse from Alaska, to carry their child. When the baby was diagnosed with a life-threatening but treatable heart condition, the parents wanted an abortion. West refused. She was, as the New York Post reported, "contractually obligated" to undergo the procedure anyway.
West described in court what that procedure would have entailed: "It would have been a two-day procedure…they would have injected his heart with a solution that would stop it." Two days later, the dead child would have been removed. "It was terrifying," West testified.
She fled to Texas instead — where most abortions are banned — and gave birth on Aug. 12.
Now the biological parents are in a Dallas courtroom demanding their parental rights. "He's our child," Gilkar testified through tears. She called West "unstable" and accused her of trying to "take him from us." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the baby's condition has worsened and that right-to-life groups and GOP officeholders have rushed to West's side.
Here's what the coverage won't say plainly: the contract itself is the scandal. A document that obligates a woman to let strangers inject her womb with a solution to stop a living child's heart is not a "surrogacy agreement." It's a hit contract dressed up in legal paper. And the industry that writes these contracts — that treats a child as a deliverable subject to quality control — is not building families. It's trafficking in human life.
The parents didn't want a baby. They wanted a perfect baby. When the product didn't meet specifications, they demanded destruction. That's not parenthood. That's consumerism applied to human flesh.
And West? She signed a document giving strangers the right to decide whether her body would be used to grow a child or kill one. That's not empowerment. That's exploitation marketed as autonomy.
The court will decide who gets custody of this sick child. But the real question hangs over the entire industry: if a contract can order a child's death before birth, what exactly did the parents buy — and what does that make the seller?
