The Supreme Court is staying out of a wrenching fight between a surrogate mother and the California couple whose baby she carried. Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday declined, without comment, to pause lower-court rulings that gave custody of the infant to his genetic parents, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, NBC News reports. The surrogate, McKenna West, a cardiac nurse from Anchorage, Alaska who had the baby last month in Texas and named him Gabriel, argued California courts denied her due process and said she fears he won't get adequate care.
The 5-week-old boy—called Rumi by his parents—was born with a severe heart defect and has already undergone surgery. West has argued that she should have custody because she defied the parents' request to have an abortion after the heart defect was detected. Courts in Alaska and Texas ultimately deferred to California, whose judges, and later Texas' high court, backed the parents' plan to treat the baby there, calling his survival the "paramount concern."
The parents have called West "unstable." "She's making us run from doctor to doctor, state to state with our baby. She's trying to take him," Gilkar told a judge in Texas last month. "We are truly grateful that Rumi can continue receiving the treatment he needs to survive, and that he will not be stripped away from what has been described by doctors as the excellent care of his parents," Adam Wolf, an attorney for the couple, said after Tuesday's ruling, per the AP.
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