Baby Gabriel and the Abortion Clause: The Dark Reality of Surrogacy
On Wednesday, August 12, a baby boy was born three weeks early in a hospital near Dallas. This is hardly an unusual event. However, that this particular child was born was a near miracle. Baby Gabriel had been the target of a conspiracy against his life that nearly resulted in his destruction, and which has drawn international scrutiny of one of the darkest, and least-talked-about aspects of the surrogacy industry.
The woman who gave birth to him had named him Gabriel. However, she was not permitted to hold him. McKenna West is a nurse and a single mother of two from Alaska. Last year she contracted to carry a child for a California couple, through a Connecticut firm called Worldwide Surrogacy Specialists. She became pregnant in December 2025.
In April, an ultrasound revealed that the child she was carrying had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a defect that leaves the heart’s left side unable to pump blood as it should. It is serious. However, it is treatable, calling for a series of operations beginning almost immediately after birth.
The couple who had commissioned West to serve as their surrogate demanded that West abort the baby. As insane as it sounds, they were perfectly entitled to make that demand, from a legal perspective. Their “right” to do so was explicitly in the contract with West.
Saved From Abortion, Gabriel Faces an Uncertain Future
Fortunately for Baby Gabriel, no physician in Alaska would perform the abortion at twenty-two weeks. The couple scheduled one in Seattle, then pushed it to May, by which point Gabriel would have been twenty-four weeks along. West refused, offering instead to have her brother and sister-in-law adopt the child. The couple stopped paying her, demanded the return of what they had already paid, and sued for more than one hundred thousand dollars.
Live Action’s Lila Rose and the podcaster Ellen Fisher helped West get to Texas, and to a hospital willing to operate on Gabriel. On August 11, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton secured an emergency court order requiring that life-saving care be provided at birth and forbidding anyone to obstruct or delay it. The federal Department of Health and Human Services wrote to the Dallas hospitals reminding them that the disability law forbids withholding treatment on a judgment that a disabled patient’s life “has less value” or that he “would impose a burden on others.”
Gabriel was born the next day and survived. However, the story is far from over. In a bizarre twist, because a California court has recognized the commissioning couple as his legal parents, the two people who spent four months trying to have him killed now have custody, while the woman who saved his life may not even visit him. She has said she will fight for custody to the United States Supreme Court if she must.
Forced Abortion: A ‘Hitman Contract’
Her attorney, Lincoln Wilson, described the arrangement his client had signed this way:
These forced abortion clauses that demand that women have to be required to abort a child at the late term are quite common in surrogacy contracts. There’s some contracts the law doesn’t enforce. Like the law doesn’t enforce a hitman contract. This is basically a hitman contract, and we think that even if you accept a liberal view of abortion rights, the right to get an abortion also entails the right to not get an abortion.
That Wilson uses the term “hitman” reminds me of Pope Francis’ famously blunt comments that abortion amounts to “hiring a hitman to resolve a problem.” However, in these surrogacy agreements we find a particularly cold-hearted instance of what Pope Francis was referring to: forcing a woman who is carrying a life within her body to have that child killed.
While this is the most egregious way such contracts violate basic bodily integrity of surrogate mothers, it is only the beginning. Valerie Hudson, a professor at Texas A&M University, read West’s contract and catalogued what it required of her. She could not travel more than seventy-five miles from home without permission, work nights, or eat brie or mousse. She was forbidden to breastfeed the child. Her name would never appear on his birth certificate, and she agreed never to contact him. Harm done to her by the pregnancy was her own affair, with one exception: a hysterectomy was worth ten thousand dollars.
And if they demanded an abortion and she complied, she would receive an additional two thousand dollars. Two thousand dollars. That is the figure the market arrived at for the death of Gabriel.
West’s own lawsuit alleges something worse – a conflict of interest that left her without any legal protection. Her own attorney, she says, was on the commissioning parents’ payroll and answered to the agency’s lawyer. When she refused to abort, her own lawyer opposed her and had her served with a letter saying so. She had signed away her body, her diet, her travel, and her child, without anyone in the room working for her.
The Horror of the Abortion Clause
This is not the first time that a surrogate mother’s unwillingness to obey an “abortion clause” in her contract has led to a dystopian scenario where the woman who has given up her body to give life to a child is facing off against those who have merely purchased the child, and are demanding its death.
In Ontario, a same-sex couple sued their surrogate for roughly six hundred thousand dollars. Two years earlier, an ultrasound at twenty-two weeks had shown that the child she was carrying had a cleft lip, with the possibility of a cleft palate or a minor heart issue. The couple sent her a formal letter:
Considering that medical tests indicate that the fetus has, or is likely to have, a genetic, chromosomal or other abnormality or defect, and in accordance with article 8.5 (a) of our surrogacy agreement … we want to inform you of our wish that the pregnancy be terminated. Although very difficult, this decision is free and informed.
The surrogate refused the abortion and pressed for further testing. Specialists in Toronto confirmed the boy was otherwise healthy, and the couple relented. The claim they eventually filed says nothing of the termination request, resting instead on her handling of medical decisions. Both she and her agency date the breakdown of the relationship with the contracting couple to the day she declined to abort the child. “They didn’t get the perfect child they wanted,” she said, “and they threw me away.” The boy is being raised by them.
Surrogacy: A Child Ordered to Specification
When Pope Francis called for a universal ban on surrogacy in 2024, he said, “A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.”
Gabriel was the basis of a commercial contract. Every circumstance of his coming into the world was settled before he existed: who would carry him, what she could eat, whether she could nurse him, whether she would ever learn his name, and the conditions under which he would be killed before birth, together with the bonus payable on completion. He was ordered to specification, and when the specification was not met, the contract supplied a remedy.
While Gabriel’s story has made the headlines, the reality is that there are an estimated 20-30,000 surrogate births every year. Most of these cases will include an abortion clause, and in most cases, the surrogate mother will follow the clause when the purchasers of the child demand that she do so.
The Church anticipated all of this long ago. In 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote in Donum Vitae that surrogate motherhood “offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents,” and that it “sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families” (no. 3).
That is the Gabriel case exactly. One woman supplied the body, another party the genes, a third the paperwork. A court then assigned the child to whoever held the strongest legal claim, and the only person in the arrangement who loved him was escorted out of the room.
The World Is Waking Up to the Dark Reality of Surrogacy
While many people view opposition to surrogacy as a peculiar Catholic position, the reality is that a sea-change is happening right now, as the obvious abuses endemic in surrogacy become more widely known.
The reality is that it is almost impossible to claim to be “pro-choice” because of a conviction of the centrality of “bodily autonomy,” while defending a practice that literally turns a woman’s body into an incubator for somebody else’s child, an incubator that is bought and sold at market value and controlled through carefully-worded legal contracts.
Last October, Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, delivered a report to the General Assembly calling for surrogacy to be abolished worldwide, likening the practice to human trafficking. Among the harms she identified for children born this way was “the arbitrary and forceful termination of their lives in utero at the discretion of the commissioning parents.”
On June 22, alongside the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Italy, Chile, Cameroon and the Holy See issued a joint declaration calling for an international moratorium. Italy banned surrogacy in 2004 and in the same year made it a crime for Italians to purchase it abroad. Germany, Austria, Finland, Norway, and Slovakia already forbid it, and more than fifty countries prohibit it in both its commercial and its so-called altruistic forms.
However, there was pushback. Speaking for twenty-six European Union member states, Ireland argued that restricting surrogacy would “erase diverse realities” and “reinforce gender stereotypes.” And the United States? We are now, with Ukraine and Mexico, among the handful of nations where the practice is effectively unregulated. As Professor Hudson puts it, “in some states, a pet-grooming salon has more regulation than a surrogacy agency.” Commissioning parents frequently undergo no background check at all. So long as they have the money to pay, practically anything goes.
What is a Mother? Refuting the Lie at the Heart of Surrogacy
When McKenna West wrote to the agency to explain that she would not go through with the abortion, she said this:
After careful thought, I have decided that I cannot terminate this pregnancy. This baby is in my body, and I care for him very much. I’m concerned that I will not be able to live with myself if I went through with terminating this precious baby who has now become a part of me.
And there, in a few sentences, is the madness of the surrogacy industry. The whole apparatus of gestational surrogacy – the vocabulary of “carriers” and “intended parents,” the clause forbidding her to nurse him, the clause keeping her name off his certificate – exists to erase her from the picture. It is built to produce a woman who can hand over a child and feel nothing, who is reduced to a mere incubator.
It does not work, because it is based upon a lie about what a mother is.
Three thousand years ago two women stood before Solomon claiming the same infant, and the king called for a sword (1 Kings 3:16-28). The true mother was the one who would rather lose her son than see him divided. What identified her was her willingness to give him up so that he might live.
McKenna West offered to surrender Gabriel to her brother so that he would be born. Then she flew three thousand miles so that he would be treated. For this she has received a lawsuit and a restraining order, and the child is with the people who wanted him dead.
Our courts have lost what Solomon knew. The Church has not, and neither, increasingly, has the world. Surrogacy cannot be regulated into decency, because the harm lies not in its abuses but in its fundamental premises: that a child may be commissioned, a mother contracted, and the two of them separated by prior agreement. It can only be abolished.
Let us pray this week for Gabriel, who has surgeries and a long fight ahead of him. For McKenna West, for Kyla Simpson, and for the mother in Ontario whose name we do not know. For the women in poverty whose wombs are for rent, and who signed papers they were never permitted to understand. And for husbands and wives who long for children and cannot conceive, whose grief is real and whose desire is good, that they may find a Church willing to walk with them rather than an industry willing to exploit their vulnerability.
Human Life International
As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.
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