On Tuesday, a court in Dallas, Texas will convene to decide the fate of a small baby called Gabriel or Rumi, depending on who you believe his mother is. Gabriel-Rumi is at present a sort of Schrödinger’s baby, suspended between possible futures and suspended also, poor sod, between life and death: born with heart disease, headed now for surgery.
Gabriel-Rumi’s short life has so far been the subject of a media frenzy, for reasons I’ll explain, but should he later look back and be appalled at all the fuss, I’d like him to know what a service he’s already done the world.
A woman who carries a child isn’t just storage – she’s bonded and the baby feels that bond too
The global surrogacy business surges on, valued at almost $40 billion, heading for $300 billion by 2030; an accelerating factory belt of babies commissioned, grown, sold. No one who profits from it wants to pause the gravy train or look too hard for harm. But the case of baby Gabriel-Rumi makes the cost of surrogacy – all surrogacy – painfully clear.
Gabriel-Rumi’s biological parents, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, are from California. They conceived using IVF and decided, for unknown reasons, to use a surrogate. Perhaps Nausheen couldn’t carry the baby, or perhaps, like a growing number of western women, she’d put in the hard yards at the gym, looked hot on her socials and didn’t fancy stretch marks. Some women now use surrogates because they’re freaked out by the thought of labour. ‘Social surrogacy’, it’s called, to distinguish it from the medical sort. Is it morally right to outsource physical pain?
Anyway, for whatever reason Nausheen and Omar contracted Worldwide Surrogacy Specialists LLC, WSS contacted McKenna West, and Gabriel-Rumi was implanted. All was dandy until the 20-week scan when it was discovered that he had a heart condition, hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS), which would require surgery shortly after birth.
At that point, Nausheen and Omar decided to abort, which contractually they had a right to do. McKenna at first agreed and made the appointment, before realising that she couldn’t bring herself to kill the baby. Children with HLHS can lead happy lives and Gabriel deserved a chance, she said, and she offered to have him and bring him up herself. McKenna didn’t want cash; this wasn’t any sort of shakedown. It was the baby she was thinking of, and at a later stage she offered to give up any parental rights if Nausheen and Omar would agree to the life-saving surgery.
The couple thought it best to kill their son. McKenna was prepared to suffer and to disrupt her existing life in order for him to live. Which woman acted more like a mother? I’m not attacking Nausheen. All over the world mothers abort babies for less serious reasons. But parental love is sacrificial. It was Mc-Kenna who demonstrated that love.
And is it all that surprising? I remember the 20-week scan as a turning point in my own pregnancy. The size, the heartbeat, the obvious life of the baby jolted me into a realisation that here, truly, was another person, and that I loved him and had a duty to care for him. In many ways it was a terrible realisation for a woman as irresponsible as me, and it came with a premonition of all the future worry and grief that love involves. I think of that moment as the beginning of motherhood, and it was entirely bound up with the physical closeness of the baby. Distance allows for denial – in pregnancy as in all manner of other scenarios. When your aged grandparents are at a distance, for instance, it’s easy to persuade yourself that it’s fine not to visit, less unsettling for them. Up close, the truth outs.
A convenient language has evolved to keep the fiction of uncomplicated surrogacy alive and to persuade us all that you can fracture motherhood: split off the egg from the womb, and the womb from the parenting, with absolutely no harm done. Surrogates are known as ‘gestational carriers’, and like egg donors they’re treated as if they’ve done no more than a regular good turn, given blood maybe. But the difference between Nausheen and McKenna’s reactions to their son’s disease shows how wrongheaded this notion is.
A woman who carries a child isn’t just storage – she’s bonded and the baby feels that bond too. Well, of course it does. The womb is its whole reality. A baby is born already knowing and listening out for a birth mother’s voice, and her smell and her heartbeat – and when it’s deprived of them, it suffers. We know now that if a baby is parted from his birth mother, he interprets her absence as life-threatening and it triggers an emergency stress response. His cortisol spikes and his blood pressure rises. It’s one of those many biological realities that people who call themselves progressive try to will away.
They insist on ‘bodily autonomy’ and a mother’s right to choose right up to birth, for abortion. But if a surrogate like McKenna wants to save a baby, I wonder, is it still ‘her body, her choice’?
The couple did not take McKenna up on her offer to care for their baby. They insisted on abortion, and so she fled with Gabriel-Rumi on board to Texas, where she felt he was safer. Texas not only bans abortion in almost all circumstances but gives the woman who carries the child, rather than the commissioning parents, the authority to decide on medical care.
Gabriel-Rumi was born on 12 August in Dallas, and he owes his life to McKenna West, but even so he may never be allowed to meet her. Nausheen and Omar are now the baby’s legal parents and they’ve procured a court order preventing McKenna from coming near him. They’re also suing her, seeking up to $250,000 for breach of contract, though I’m not sure where they think she’ll find that sort of money. And who knows, should they win next week’s battle for long-term custody, how they’ll possibly explain to their son why they decided to destroy the woman who saved his life.
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