Baby Gabriel West: a surrogate fled to Texas to save a child his genetic parents wanted aborted. America’s right to homicide by omission, sanctioned by courts.
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Lately, U.S. news, globalized via social media, has been serving up stories of women with infanticidal tendencies. While Lindsay Clancy is currently in the spotlight (the woman who strangled her three children, apparently under the influence of an adverse reaction to psychiatric medications that are prescribed for everything in the U.S.), we should not let go unreflected a case that undoubtedly illustrates the madness of a society based on contracts: that of baby Gabriel/Rumi.
Once upon a time, there was a nurse from Alaska named McKenna West who, anticipating a payment of $60,000, agreed to act as a surrogate mother for Omar Ahmed and Nasheen Gilkar, a heterosexual couple from California. A clause in the contract gave the genetic parents the right to demand an abortion should the product turn out to have defects. When the fetus was five months along, a serious, though treatable, heart condition was discovered. Consequently, McKenna was contractually obligated to abort the pregnancy. Heroically, she fled to Texas, where abortion is prohibited and birth mothers are legally recognized as the child’s mother.
What could have been going through McKenna’s mind when she agreed to get herself into this mess? Certainly, had she been a staunch pro-life advocate, she would not have found herself in this situation. She was likely a woman who subscribed to the prevailing common sense in the U.S.—a country where pro-life advocates are kept out of sight during elections because they are perceived as radicals (in Brazil, the opposite is true: it is abortion advocates who are kept out of sight during elections). In the U.S., it is considered common sense that abortion is normal and a woman’s right; much of this discourse is accompanied by the notion that it is better to die than to lead a life of suffering. McKenna surely did not believe that the baby’s genetic parents held values vastly different from her own, given that both parties relied on science to create human life and terminate it whenever convenient. Perhaps she imagined them as loving parents who did not want to bring a suffering child into the world. However, given that Alaska is arguably the most permissive state regarding abortion (for instance, it has no gestational age limit), it is probable that the couple chose her precisely for the option of ordering an abortion right before delivery.
At twenty-eight, McKenna was already a mother (a single mother) of two children and knew what it was like to carry a baby. Nasheen, the wealthy woman in her forties, knew nothing of this, yet she was the only woman with the right to make decisions under the contract. Her relationship to motherhood was akin to placing an order on Amazon. The logical consequence of the slogan “my body, my rules” is the possibility of renting that body out to third parties who, possessing greater economic power, dictate the rules of the contract.
In countries like Brazil — and many in Europe that do not operate under Common Law — a woman who gives birth is legally the child’s mother. That is why wealthy individuals seeking to purchase laboratory-created babies carried by surrogate mothers travel abroad, particularly to the United States. In the U.S., legal precedent favoring the sale of babies by mothers existed even prior to the advent of in vitro fertilization; consider the case of “Baby M,” born in 1986. She was the biological daughter of a surrogate mother and was conceived via artificial insemination; the father was a Jew who believed that having lost family in the Holocaust entitled him to perfect offspring, free from the alleged genetic issues carried by his wife. The mother regretted agreeing to sell her daughter and refused to honor the arrangement, yet the state ultimately sided with the buyers (albeit in the name of the child’s “best interests”). Of course, this only became an issue because the mother refused to hand over the child; Baby M’s father had no groundbreaking idea—he simply held realistic expectations of purchasing a baby within the U.S. legal framework that predated the Big Fertility era.
Let us return to McKenna’s saga. She fled to Texas and gave birth to the child she named Gabriel West. By then, the buyers had already petitioned the courts in California, a pro-eugenics state, and secured recognition as the unborn baby’s parents. Such determination stemmed from the fact that the paying parents did not want the child to receive life-saving treatment at birth; they wanted the child—whom they considered their son—transferred from Texas to California, where they intended to let him die. Well, under Brazilian law, omission of aid is a crime. If it were proven in Brazil that someone had conspired to deprive a child of medical treatment necessary for survival, it would be interpreted—correctly, in my view—as attempted murder. Nevertheless, the child was saved thanks to two court orders issued in Texas, by which McKenna, as a mother, could authorize the surgery. Without the intervention of a state that dissents from the mainstream, the United States would sanction this homicide by omission.
After a long humanitarian tradition of caring for the poor and the sick—initiated by early Christianity and strengthened during the Middle Ages—the Calvinists’ liberal political experiment invented this right to homicide by omission. Only the “elect” get to go to the hospital.
Since Texas is not a country, the Californian couple can assert rights over the baby, whom they call Rumi. The child was taken from McKenna and handed over to the couple. Not content with keeping the child for free due to a breach of contract, the couple is suing McKenna and demanding $100,000 from her for having “kidnapped” the very child they wanted to kill. Madness? Well, the latest news regarding baby Gabriel West/Rumi Ahmed is that his health has deteriorated. If there is indeed logic to the madness, then the parents will kill this baby—with the United States’ blessing—before the legal imbroglio surrounding his maternity can bring any improvement to the lives of these poor children gestated through commercial means.
