I’ve always understood the case for surrogacy, but it always made me squeamish for all the reasons you can imagine.
It may not exactly be human trafficking, but it sure seems adjacent to it. It’s not exactly paying for a baby, but more akin to renting a body to use as a womb.
Still, you can understand why people desperate to have a biological child and/or unwilling to run the gauntlet it takes to adopt one would explore this option. It is less clear to me why, aside from money, anybody would agree to carry the baby, but I can’t read anybody’s mind if they agreed to do so.
BREAKING: Surrogate mother McKenna, responsible for saving baby Gabriel’s life, is being sued $100K by the buyers for violating the contract by refusing to abort.
They are now planning to keep baby Gabriel.
All while suing the mother who saved his life. pic.twitter.com/OP79aKlvux
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) August 19, 2026
As with so many things that our moral intuitions tell us to question, I was right to do so. Whatever the arguments you can make for surrogacy, they are far outweighed by the rather gross reality we all too often read about.
Of course, we only hear about the gross cases, so I suppose I should keep that in mind, but those cases do reveal a gritty reality just underneath the smiling photos of parents with their infants: these are contractual relationships, and those contracts are in themselves morally problematic because they treat the babies as products.
Products that you can accept or reject, as you can with anything else you can buy.
The biological parents of the child birthed by surrogate mother McKenna West are suing her more than $100,000 for keeping the baby rather than abort it at their request, according to a report.
Nasheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed filed a countersuit against West, a 28-year-old nurse from Alaska, weeks before she gave birth in Texas to their baby, who was born with a serious and rare heart defect, TMZ reported.
They agreed to pay West $60,000 to carry their child — with an abortion clause that allowed them to terminate the pregnancy if there were issues with the fetus, according to the lawsuit.
At around 20 weeks, the unborn child was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a life-threatening medical condition — but West refused their request to abort it, and instead traveled to Texas, where she would be recognized as the birth mother under state law.
The baby was born on Aug. 12. West named him Gabriel, but the biological parents insist his name is Rumi.
Gilkar and Ahmed are asking a judge to award them more than $100,000 in damages from McKenna for breaking the deal plus unspecified damages for her alleged “malicious, outrageous conduct.”
The fact that a couple would contract to have a healthy baby and require that anything but be murdered is grotesque, even if it is legal. And suing a surrogate for failing to kill your child makes you, in my mind, a moral monster.
It’s hard to say how this will all play out in court, or, for that matter, how the child, as he grows up, will deal with the fact that his parents, who insist on keeping him now that he is born, wanted him dead and are angry enough that he isn’t that they demand payment. But one thing is clear: any “contract” that demands murder, or even just the disposal of a “fetus,” should never be allowed.
West’s decision to keep the baby has ignited a national discussion on abortion and surrogacy — and has involved courts and officials in three states.
Gilkar and Ahmed “haven’t given [West] anything” since she declined to terminate the pregnancy, Lincoln Wilson, an attorney for West, told The Post.
No doubt many people will argue, both in defense of or in criticism of the situation, that this is a natural consequence of capitalism. But really it isn’t.
Capitalism is not a complete moral system, just as our Republican form of government is not fit to govern people whose moral compass is irreparably skewed. That is why the Founders warned that only a religious people could be fit to govern themselves in this manner.
Capitalism cannot be moral if the people themselves are not, and if the people are moral, then capitalism maximizes the freedom a moral people can exercise in a manner consistent with maximizing liberty and prosperity.
The problem here is moral defectiveness, not the freedom to let it roam freely. The same moral defectiveness would express itself in any other economic system, and perhaps in an even worse way. Imagine such a system in China; women wouldn’t even have a choice in the matter.
We can’t create processes that prevent the fundamental moral flaws of man from expressing themselves, so fostering virtue and moral seriousness is at least as necessary as creating good forms of governance.
We are failing in that regard.
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