McKenna West thought that surrogacy would be an easy way to make more money for her family. As a single mother, she knew she couldn’t afford to take on a second job. Surrogacy provided her with an easy way to bring joy and life to another family while blessing her own with the financial benefits.
Instead, West has seen the radical Left’s “empathy” and “female empowerment” in action. Today, her courageous stand against aborting “Baby Gabriel” has resulted in a lawsuit from his biological parents and a temporary restraining order preventing her from seeing the child she carried for nine months.
Not only that, but West has “virtually no legal claim to the child”. The parents who preferred their son to be dead rather than born with a disability have successfully retained custody of him. Thankfully, we’ve since learnt that Baby Gabriel’s biological parents are giving him the proper medical care he needs. Yet their treatment of West and belated acceptance of their son’s condition speaks volumes about surrogacy’s commodification and dehumanisation of human life.
After becoming pregnant through IVF, West thought that everything was going well. That is, until the 20-week ultrasound revealed that the baby she carried had hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) and might not survive past birth without medical intervention. The baby’s biological parents immediately demanded an abortion – for a condition that is treatable with three surgeries – and sued West when she refused. Not only that, but the parents also indicated that they would not require medical professionals to give their son life-saving support upon delivery.
They were completely fine with ending their son’s life when he was already at 20 weeks’ gestation – a point at which unborn children can feel pain, especially the excruciating pain of a late-term abortion. This pain would affect West too. It would force her to endure an incredibly painful, dangerous and invasive procedure that she felt morally and physically uncomfortable with. Baby Gabriel’s parents seemingly had no qualms about forcing West into this choice. In fact, their surrogacy contract – which West foolishly signed – demanded abortion in case of fetal “anomaly”.
On August 12, Baby Gabriel was born in a Texas hospital. His biological parents have already gained custody of Baby Gabriel and are denying that they ever hesitated about giving him the life-saving care he needed – even though West claims that she received a call from Worldwide Surrogacy telling her that Baby Gabriel’s parents had “officially requested that she undergo an abortion”. West was horrified to discover that the abortion would have to be a dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortion, given Baby Gabriel’s gestational age.
Laughably, in a statement through their attorney Lee Budner, the couple implied their son had been rescued from West’s “baseless attempt to interfere with his medical care”. Do Baby Gabriel’s parents think a painful late-term abortion qualifies as “medical care”? And now that they are playing the protective parent role, are they really going to pretend that they’ve always had his best interests at heart?
Therein lies the problem with surrogacy. The process of buying a child and renting a woman’s womb through surrogacy and IVF has resulted in commodification and dehumanisation of both babies and mothers at an alarming rate. The very same individuals preaching about female bodily autonomy see no issue with renting out a woman’s womb and then forcing her to have invasive medical procedures performed on her body at her womb-renters’ whim. They see no problem ending their own son’s life because he might not be the “perfect” specimen they hoped to create in the IVF and surrogacy process.
“I feel like this object,” West told Live Action News. “They feel that because they paid me, they have these rights to my autonomy.” West also says that this experience has opened her eyes to the dangers of surrogacy itself. “It’s a disturbing thing to be on this side of it and realise how the contracts are so unsupportive of the woman who is going through all of it for somebody else,” she told Live Action. “And to think, ‘Oh, because we’re paying you, we’re demanding this termination and if you don’t do it you’re liable for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars’ is really sick and wrong, and this whole thing has greatly changed my perspective on surrogacy.”
Unfortunately, West’s tragedy is the logical outcome of an industry built on treating children as products and women as mere vessels for those products. Thankfully, Baby Gabriel survived his parents’ attempt to end his life in the womb. Yet his surrogate now faces a lawsuit and restraining order for heroically saving his life.
Their case should serve as a warning to any woman considering surrogacy. It should also serve as a call for lawmakers to examine the obvious dangers of an industry that commodifies and dehumanises human life and legally coerces women into unwanted abortions.
