McKenna West, a cardiac nurse from Anchorage, signed a surrogacy contract in August 2025 with Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar of California. Like many such contracts, it included a clause permitting termination of the pregnancy in the event of a "fetal abnormality." At about twenty weeks, in April, doctors diagnosed the unborn child with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a defect that leaves one side of the heart too underdeveloped to pump blood to the body and would require multiple surgeries after birth. Ahmed and Gilkar asked West to end the pregnancy under that clause. She scheduled at least two abortion appointments. Both times, she testified in court, she could not go through with it.
Instead, West traveled from California to Texas, where abortion is banned by state law, and delivered the boy roughly three weeks early in the Dallas area in mid-August. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) obtained an emergency court order requiring hospital staff to provide the newborn with life-saving treatment. The intended parents named the boy Rumi; West calls him Gabriel. On September 1, a Texas court dismissed her custody claim and upheld an earlier California ruling naming Ahmed and Gilkar the child's legal parents. West's appeal to the nation's highest court failed three weeks later, closing off her last avenue in the courts.
A Heart the Contract Could Not Define
Strip away the contracts, the filings, and the two states' worth of judges, and one plain fact sits at the center of this case: a woman looked at a baby marked "abnormal" on a hospital chart, sat with an abortion appointment waiting for her not once but twice, and could not make herself go through with it. The courts have now settled who raises that boy. They were never able to settle, and could not settle, whether he was worth keeping. That question was answered before any judge in Texas or California was born.
Scripture does not measure a life by the strength of its heart valves. It measures a life by whose hands formed it.
"For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb." (Psalm 139:13)
David was not writing about a child born strong and whole. He was writing about a self he never saw forming, wrapped in darkness, unfinished, unproven, made in secret by a God who does not ask permission from a contract. He goes on: "I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well" (Psalm 139:14). Marvellous. Not average. Not conditional on a clean scan at twenty weeks. A heart that cannot pump the way it should is still a heart the Lord knit together on purpose, in a place no surgeon and no paperwork can reach.
A clause can call a child an "abnormality." Heaven has never once used that word for a soul it made.
My friend, if a chart, a diagnosis, or a hard season has ever told you that your worth is conditional, hear this plainly: it is not. The same God who formed a struggling heart in secret formed yours. He did not wait until you were finished to love you, and He is not waiting now. That is the whole scandal of the gospel — that Christ died for the imperfect, the unfinished, the ones the world was prepared to set aside. He did not die for the healthy and the impressive. He died for sinners, full stop, and He calls that a marvellous work too.
A nurse who could not go through with what a clause on paper told her to do was not following sentiment. Something in her, made by the same hand that made the child, would not let her. That is the fingerprint of a Creator who still writes His law on hearts He never signed away.