It’s a heartrending story that has been making headlines across the country: A nurse from Alaska was working as a surrogate mother for a California couple when the fetus was diagnosed with a serious heart condition that would require multiple surgeries and would likely impact his health for the rest of his life. The biological parents demanded an abortion. The surrogate fought them, making her way to anti-abortion Texas for maximal protection. The parents said they would withhold medical treatment if the surrogate didn’t go through with the abortion; she defied them. Baby Gabriel has now been born, and while the surrogate has not succeeded in claiming parental rights, he is getting the treatment he needs in Dallas.
Heartrending indeed. And basically none of it is true.
The baby’s name is not Gabriel; it’s Rumi. His parents, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, did not demand that the surrogate, McKenna West, terminate or else they would allow a newborn baby to suffer without treatment; they in fact want him getting treatment at a top-rate facility in Los Angeles, not at a less-excellent one in Texas. The surrogate parents legally could not have forced West to terminate in the first place, no matter which state she was in, and when she said she didn’t want to have an abortion they said that was fine. She didn’t decamp to Texas because it bans abortion, but because Texas often confers parental rights onto whoever gives birth. Rumi’s parents are in fact getting him the treatment he needs, which has been complicated by the fact that West insisted on birthing in Texas instead of in California, where Rumi’s care would have been better. And it strikes me as… interesting… that the anti-abortion movement gave the baby a strongly Christian-coded name without having any idea of what his actual parents planned to call him.
The story is a story because it’s a mess, but it’s also a story because the anti-abortion movement has latched onto it and exploited it. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently running against James Talarico for a US Senate seat, has put himself in the middle of the whole debacle in order to score campaign points. Some of the country’s most prominent “pro-life” activists have made this their latest cause as a way of demonizing both abortion and surrogacy. The degree to which abortion opponents have manipulated and outright invented facts in this case is stunning, even from a movement rife with dishonestly and manipulation.
They have, however, succeeded in directing the public’s attention to this case, and by extension to commercial surrogacy. And defenders of women’s rights are perilously off-guard. Unlike our counterparts across most of Europe, American feminists have not deeply grappled with the surrogacy issue, instead layering it onto American abortion politics, if we think about it at all. That winds up with simplistic and unsatisfying conclusions, like “her body her choice” — when commercial surrogacy is complicated by money, contracts, power, biology, and truly complex ethical questions about paying for reproduction and whether something can even be fairly considered paid work if it comes with no seconds let alone days off, no labor protections, no way to simply quit, and significant physical risk up to and including death.
The anti-surrogacy movement, which overlaps significantly with the anti-abortion movement, has an easy answer: Babies shouldn’t be commodities; surrogacy should be banned. It’s tempting for supporters of women’s rights and abortion rights to simply negatively polarize ourselves here — if “pro-lifers” are against surrogacy, then we should probably be for it. That would be a mistake. And it’s women who will end up paying the price.
I will tell you up-front that I have no ideal legal framework to regulate commercial surrogacy. It is banned in almost all of Europe. Countries that allow it with little regulation have found themselves turned into hubs for human trafficking, as women from poor nations are moved to surrogacy-friendly ones to turn out babies for foreigners. It is hard to overstate what a total nightmare a whole lot of international commercial surrogacy is for the women who are coerced into it.
