Justice Elena Kagan denied surrogate mother McKenna West's emergency appeal to halt a California court order granting custody of a medically fragile newborn to his biological parents, ending a multi-state legal battle that touched abortion, disability rights, and the limits of surrogacy contracts.
Kagan acted Tuesday without referring the case to the full court or issuing a written decision, a move the New York Post reported is typical for emergency appeals. The denial leaves intact a California court order recognizing Los Angeles couple Nasheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed as the baby's legal parents, and effectively strips West of any remaining legal foothold in the fight she waged across Alaska, California, and Texas.
West, a 28-year-old Alaskan nurse and single mother of two, had agreed to carry Gilkar and Ahmed's child for $60,000 under a surrogacy contract. That contract included a clause allowing termination if doctors found an "anomaly" during the pregnancy. At 20 weeks, doctors diagnosed the baby with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a life-threatening condition that prevents normal blood flow and typically requires surgery within days of birth to survive.
Gilkar and Ahmed asked West to terminate the pregnancy. She refused. West said she "couldn't, in good faith, go through with the abortion." She then relocated to Texas, where abortion is illegal and where state law would recognize her, not the biological parents, as the child's mother.
The baby, whom West calls Gabriel and whom the biological parents call Rumi, was born August 12 at a Dallas hospital. What followed was a legal scramble across three states. West filed for full custody or conservatorship. Gilkar and Ahmed fought to enforce the California order and regain control of their child's medical care.
A Texas judge ruled that West could not make decisions about the baby's treatment or custody, and upheld the California court order. West appealed at every level. Her attorney argued that her only goal was to ensure the baby received necessary treatment for his heart condition, and that Gilkar and Ahmed had repeatedly "refused" to commit to providing appropriate care.
The biological parents' attorney, Adam Wolf, saw it differently. In a statement obtained by TMZ after the Supreme Court denial, Wolf said:
"Ms. West's legal filings across three states, numerous courts of appeals, and now the U.S. Supreme Court have sought to undermine Rumi's parents' right to provide him with the care he needs. Those efforts have been rejected by every single court."
West's lawyer countered that without the Supreme Court's intervention, West would receive "no further information about the child she carried for 37 weeks and fought to save."
Before the Supreme Court denial, the case had already drawn federal attention. The Trump administration's HHS Office for Civil Rights sent letters to Children's Medical Center of Dallas and UT Southwestern Medical Center, warning both hospitals of their federal obligations to provide medical treatment regardless of disability. Breitbart reported that HHS cited federal law prohibiting the withholding of medical treatment "based on judgments that the life of someone with a disability has less value or that the individual would impose a burden on others."
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also filed to allow the baby's heart surgery to proceed, stating that the biological parents had refused to consent to the operation and may have planned to move the child to California to make treatment decisions under that state's more permissive legal framework.
"My office utilized every tool at our disposal to protect life, and we will not back down in continuing to support baby Gabriel's well-being," Paxton said. The baby ultimately underwent open-heart surgery at the Dallas hospital, though reports indicate he may be suffering from post-operative complications.
Gilkar testified in a Dallas courtroom last month, describing the ordeal from the biological parents' perspective. "She's making us run from doctor to doctor, state to state," Gilkar said. "With our baby, she's trying to take him."
She also spoke about her son: "He's the most beautiful person I've ever seen. He's the love of our lives."
Wolf, the couple's attorney, added that the family was "truly grateful that Rumi can continue receiving the treatment he needs to survive, and that he will not be stripped away from what has been described by doctors as the excellent care of his parents."
The biological parents are now suing West for at least $100,000. The legal basis for that lawsuit, whether breach of the surrogacy contract, a tort claim, or something else, remains unclear from available court filings.
The Supreme Court's refusal marks the final stop in a legal journey that went uniformly against West. A California court declared Gilkar and Ahmed the baby's legal parents. A Texas judge upheld that order and barred West from making medical or custody decisions. Fox News reported that the Texas Supreme Court had already ruled the child could be moved to California for continued medical care before Kagan's denial.
Kagan did not detail her legal reasoning. That silence is standard for emergency appeals at the Supreme Court, where justices routinely decline without explanation. But the pattern is familiar, the Court has repeatedly declined to intervene in emergency matters where lower courts have spoken clearly.
Lawyers for the biological parents argued in filings that "a right to life is not at issue here", framing the dispute as one about contractual obligations and parental rights, not abortion. West's side framed it as a fight to save a child she believed the biological parents were willing to let die.
The case sits at the intersection of surrogacy law, abortion restrictions, disability rights, and the patchwork of state family codes that govern who counts as a parent. West chose Texas precisely because its laws would favor her claim to motherhood. The biological parents leaned on California law, which enforces surrogacy contracts and recognizes intended parents as the legal parents from birth.
That clash of legal frameworks, one state's pro-life protections working at cross-purposes with another state's surrogacy enforcement, created a jurisdictional tangle that no single court could cleanly resolve. The Supreme Court's refusal to step in means the California framework prevails, at least in this case.
Several significant questions remain unanswered. What specific medical commitments, if any, did the biological parents make or refuse? What treatment has the baby received since surgery, and what is his current condition? And what happens to West's relationship with the child she carried for nine months, a child she says she fought to save?
The Court's pattern of staying out of contested emergency appeals leaves those questions to lower courts and to the families themselves. For West, every legal door is now closed.
When a woman refuses to end a child's life and then loses that child in court, something has gone wrong, not with her conscience, but with a legal system that treats surrogacy contracts like purchase orders and parenthood like a line item.
