Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office intervened, arguing in court that Ahmed and Gilkar, as the child's legal parents, were bound under Texas law to provide their newborn son with life-saving medical treatment once he was born. A Dallas judge agreed this week, ordering that the baby receive treatment immediately at birth, that he remain in the state, and that medical decisions belong to Ahmed and Gilkar, not to West, within the terms the court set.
Ahmed and Gilkar say their son was born Wednesday morning and is now in their physical custody, under care at a hospital equipped to treat his condition, which typically requires a series of three open-heart surgeries beginning within days of birth. West, for her part, is now seeking custody of the child she carried and fought to save. Her legal defense and her move to Texas were aided by pro-life advocates who took up her cause once her story became known. The custody question remains before the courts, unresolved.
A Heart Built Wrong, and Worth Everything
Set the contracts aside a moment, my friend, and the lawyers, and the two states pulling against each other. Strip it down to the plain fact at the center: a baby's heart did not form the way hearts are supposed to form, and grown men and women had to decide, in black and white, whether that was reason enough to end him. One woman decided it was not. She got in a car, crossed state lines, and would not let go of a child who was not biologically her own but whom she carried all the same.
That is not sentiment. That is the oldest argument in the world showing up again in a Dallas courtroom: is a life measured by what it can do, how it is built, what it will cost — or is it measured by something else entirely? Scripture never once weighs a soul by the working order of its parts. The Lord who knits a child together in secret does not stop knitting when the heart comes out crooked.
"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)
Moses once stood before the burning bush making excuses, and the Lord cut him off with a question that still stands over every hospital bed: "Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD?" (Exodus 4:11). The God of the Bible is not embarrassed by a broken body. He is the one who made it, and He is the one who can be trusted with it — before birth, at birth, and after.
There is a harder word here too, and it will not let you go easy. Every one of us was born with something worse than a bad valve. Sin does not show up on an ultrasound, but it is there just the same, malforming what ought to be whole. And the world's answer to a damaged thing is too often the same answer that was proposed for that little boy in Dallas: discard it, before it costs you anything. The gospel answers otherwise. God did not discard the broken. He sent His own Son into the middle of a broken world to bleed for it, to die for it, and to rise so that ruined lives — not just ruined hearts — could be made new.
That baby in Texas will face surgeries, machines, long nights in a hospital room, and a fight that is not over. But he is fighting because somebody refused to believe his worth could be measured by an ultrasound reading. My friend, the same is true of you, whatever is malformed in your own life, whatever you have been told is not worth saving. The Lord who fashioned that child's crooked little heart is the same Lord who offers to make a new one in you, if you will let Him.