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A surrogate broke her contract – and saved a baby's life

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29.08.2026

The country has been transfixed by the Massachusetts murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the mom who unfathomably strangled her three children to death.

Another legal battle is playing out in Texas, this one involving a mother, a father and a newborn. He's alive, thankfully. Not because of his biological parents.

Because of his surrogate.

The case centers on a two-week-old baby born with a heart defect. It involves the biological parents Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed of California, a surrogate from Alaska and the state of Texas, chosen in part for its protections of the unborn and its proximity to a top children's hospital.

What's happening in the case exposes an ugly truth: Had the biological parents quietly aborted the baby, as roughly a million American couples do every year, no one outside their family would have known or cared. It was only because a surrogate broke her contract to save his life that the world is watching. Women considering surrogacy should take note: Saying yes to a contract can mean saying yes, in writing, to ending a pregnancy you might come to want.

Here's the background. McKenna West, the surrogate, refused the biological parents' request that she abort the baby after........

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