Who Has the Right? Inside One Surrogate's Fight After Refusing Parents'Abortion Request
The debate comes down to one question nobody in this case agrees on. When a contract, a diagnosis, and a due date all collide, who gets to determine what happens next? Is it the woman carrying the bab
An Alaska nurse who is more than 36 weeks pregnant is fighting in the courts of two states to secure heart surgery for the baby boy she is carrying, after the couple who hired her as a surrogate demanded a late-term abortion and sued her when she refused.
McKenna West signed up last September as a gestational surrogate through Worldwide Surrogacy Specialists. She’s a working nurse, a single mother of two, and the extra money mattered. For four months, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Then came the 20-week scan in April, and the doctor doing the anatomy check couldn’t find blood moving through the left side of the baby’s heart.
A specialist diagnosed hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a congenital disability in which the left side of the heart never fully develops.
The condition is serious, but it is not automatically fatal; the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia describes a staged surgical approach that has become standard treatment for newborns with the defect, with outcomes improving enough that infants who survive the initial operation have a strong chance of reaching adulthood.
That medical reality sits at the center of the dispute.
