Ken Paxton and Conservatives Weaponizing Surrogacy Battle to Come for Your Reproductive Rights

Ken Paxton has intervened in a private surrogacy contract between a California couple and their Alaska-based surrogate because he saw the perfect opportunity for political theater. What’s being framed by conservatives as a “surrogate saves a baby” story is actually a coordinated legal setup designed to be dragged all the way to the Supreme Court, and used to gut abortion rights, IVF, and surrogacy nationwide. I have a pit in my stomach writing this and I’ll tell you why.

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McKenna West is a 28-year-old nurse from Alaska and a single mother of two who became a surrogate to help support her own two kids financially. She was matched with a couple, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed of Los Angeles, and she signed a surrogacy contract with them in Alaska in December 2025. Standard surrogacy contracts include a termination clause for fetal abnormality, and hers did as well.

At her 20-week pregnancy scan in April, the fetus was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS), meaning the left side of the heart was either missing or too underdeveloped to pump blood properly. A baby born with HLHS needs three staged open-heart surgeries almost immediately after birth, and even in the best cases, lifetime cardiac care and an uncertain quality of life if they survive. Devastated by this news, Gilkar and Ahmed made the compassionate decision to ask West to end the pregnancy. That decision was theirs to make under the contract they signed and under California law.

This is the part most of the coverage is skipping over. According to court filings obtained by TMZ, West agreed to the termination and scheduled the appointment herself. In the days leading up to the appointment, her brother called her and offered to adopt the baby with his wife (a baby that is biologically neither West’s nor her brother’s), and West began to reconsider her appointment. She couldn’t keep the baby herself because she wouldn’t be able to afford it. On May 4, 2026, she sent a letter to Worldwide Surrogacy saying she couldn’t go through with the abortion. The biological parents refused the brother-adoption suggestion (understandably; the child is theirs biologically and they already made the decision they made) and at that point West cut off communication with Gilkar and Ahmed.

Around the same time, West connected with two national conservative organizations and Live Action, a Virginia-based anti-abortion group, who paid to fly her and her two children to Texas. She then got an attorney Lincoln Wilson, a former Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorney, now at First & Fourteenth PLLC. ADF is saying they represent her but ADF isn’t a random law firm. ADF is the same Christian conservative legal group that served as the foundation of the case that overturned Roe v. Wade. West has vowed to take this fight all the way to the Supreme Court, which is why this case has my stomach in knots tonight.

Once West gave birth in Dallas on August 12, Texas family law kicked in, and under Texas law, whoever gives birth in the state is considered the legal mother, regardless of what any contract says. Paxton’s office secured an emergency order on August 11 stopping anyone from removing the baby from Texas, and he sent a letter to UT Southwestern Medical Center and Children’s Medical Center of Dallas ordering them to perform the surgeries the intended parents didn’t consent to. He’s been all over the media calling the child “Gabriel” in his state press releases. The biological parents named him Rumi in their court filings.

Here’s the update from Wednesday’s court order that almost all coverage of this case has buried. Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed have been granted physical custody of the newborn. The TRO bars West from making any medical decisions on the baby’s behalf, representing herself as his parent, or interfering with the parents’ access. She’s due back in Dallas court on August 25. She’s separately being sued by Gilkar and Ahmed for $250,000 in breach of contract damages.

I’m in no way saying McKenna should’ve been forced to have an abortion. This isn’t what this case is about, and I’m not making that argument at all. What she did and what happened after is what makes her case different. She signed a legally binding contract that said she would abide by the intended parents’ decision if there was a serious fetal abnormality and the pregnancy needed to be terminated. She initially agreed to that termination and she scheduled the appointment. Then she teamed up with a national anti-abortion legal machine to seize custody over someone else’s biological child, for a child she can’t afford and doesn’t even want herself. The plan was for her brother and his wife to adopt the baby that is not biologically theirs. This isn’t about forcing abortion, this is about breach of contract, and about a national anti-abortion movement using a surrogacy as a pawn in a Supreme Court test case.

Why is Ken Paxton calling this baby “Gabriel” in his official press releases, when the biological parents named him Rumi in their court filings. Paxton doesn’t know these people and he certainly didn’t help conceive this child. That’s what I want you to pay attention to, the details like renaming the child for media purposes. This is exactly what political theater is.

Baby Rumi will need three staged open-heart surgeries, ongoing cardiology care, likely a heart transplant down the road, and specialized therapy for the rest of his life. Texas courts have signaled that the biological parents are financially liable for that care, which is another cruel twist, because they are being forced to pay for the exact outcome they were trying to compassionately prevent. But if this drags on and the state ends up subsidizing any of it, then it falls on all of us, the Texas taxpayers. This is a state that has closed 26+ rural hospitals since 2010, that has the highest maternal mortality rate in the country, that has 4.7 million uninsured because Abbott refuses to expand Medicaid, that can’t get an ambulance to a rural county in under an hour. This state doesn’t have the resources to bankroll Ken Paxton’s press-tour narrative, but somehow, here we are.

If McKenna West had gone into labor and experienced a serious complication, you know, the kind that requires a medical abortion to save the mother’s life, she’s in the same state that’s let woman after woman die on the operating table because doctors are bound by the abortion ban. She flew into a state that wouldn’t have protected her if things went sideways. The regime she came here to help weaponize is the regime that kills Texas women every month.

Paxton is losing his U.S. Senate race to James Talarico. He raised almost no money last quarter, he went on Fox News last week and begged viewers to donate to his campaign, and the data center donation scandal has him boxed in. He needs a national abortion story, and he needs it now, so this case fell into his crosshairs. Texas Alliance for Life has already applauded him and McKenna West has been working the conservative news cycle nonstop, giving interviews to anyone that will book her.

If this case reaches the Supreme Court the way it is teeing up to, it becomes the vehicle for a new ruling that goes way beyond abortion. It could be used to gut IVF, to gut commercial surrogacy nationwide (because it makes a gestational contract meaningless), and to further restrict every non-nuclear family’s access to reproductive healthcare. That’s the actual endgame here…I’m terrified this is the setup for the next Dobbs.

Every conservative talking point about fetal personhood should apply here right? If a fetus has full personhood rights at conception, then Baby Rumi has been the legal child of Gilkar and Ahmed since the day their embryo was implanted. McKenna West carried their legal child across state lines to another state. Under any consistent personhood framework, that’s kidnapping. But for some reason, personhood only counts when it is politically useful. Republicans pick and choose when fetuses are people and when they are not, and the case they are cheering right now is proof.

Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed did NOTHING wrong. They tried to have a baby, they followed the legal process, they signed a contract with a licensed agency and when they got a devastating diagnosis at 20 weeks, they made the same call that a lot of loving prospective parents in their position make, out of compassion for a child who would face three open-heart surgeries and a lifetime of pain. They now have physical custody of their newborn son and they’re watching a state government they have no political connection to try to seize legal control over him, and are staring down a Supreme Court fight none of them signed up for. Every medical complication their son goes through from here on out, all the surgeries, all the recoveries, all the intensive care stays, is exactly the suffering they were making a compassionate decision to spare him from. The trauma being inflicted on this family right now is horrific and it is being done in front of the whole country.

1. The Texas Tribune, ABC News, and the TMZ letter exclusive have all of the facts, so don’t let sensationalized headlines take over.

2. Early voting in Texas runs October 19 through October 30 and includes a Saturday and Sunday in most counties. You can go votetexas.gov to print out and mail your registration form before October 5.

3. On November 3, vote James Talarico for U.S. Senate against Ken Paxton. This is exactly the kind of political theater Senator Paxton would spend the next six years running, and he would run it on a national stage with federal power behind him. Vote Gina Hinojosa for Governor against Greg Abbott. Vote Vikki Goodwin for Lieutenant Governor against Dan Patrick. Vote Ben Flores for Land Commissioner. Vote Democrat down-ballot.

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See y’all tomorrow.