The Alaska Surrogacy Case: The Risks Intended Parents Need to Understand Before They Match

I have been getting messages about this case for two weeks now. Some are from intended parents who are already mid-journey and frightened. Some are from people who were just about to sign with an agency and have suddenly frozen. And some are from people who have read one headline, drawn one conclusion, and want me to confirm it.

So let me be clear about mine.

I don't think this is simply a case of "two sides with different opinions." I believe the surrogate's actions were deeply wrong, particularly her decision to continue the pregnancy against the intended parents' wishes and then relocate to another state and pursue custody there.

That does not mean I believe a woman can legally be forced to undergo an abortion. Bodily autonomy and medical consent are real, and a court will ultimately have to decide the legal questions in this case.

But those two things can be true at the same time: a surrogate cannot necessarily be forced to have an abortion, and her decision to disregard the agreement with the intended parents can still be profoundly wrong.

That distinction matters.

I am not going to turn this article into a debate about abortion. What I want to do is look at what this case tells intended parents about matching, contracts, medical decision-making and jurisdiction — because the biggest lessons here are not really about what happened at 20 weeks.

They are about what should have happened before the embryo was ever transferred.

What happened, in plain terms

Let me lay out the facts that both sides agree on, and then flag clearly where the accounts diverge.

In August 2025, an Alaska nurse named McKenna West matched with a California couple, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, through a Connecticut-based agency. At the 20-week scan, the baby was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS), a serious congenital heart defect in which the left side of the heart is underdeveloped. According to the CDC, it affects roughly 1 in 3,846 babies born in the United States, requires surgery soon after birth, and surgical repair is not a cure.

After the diagnosis, the intended parents decided to terminate the pregnancy. Here the accounts split, and they split hard.

West's lawyers say the couple pressured her for weeks to have an abortion she found morally impossible. The couple's filings in Alaska say she initially agreed with the decision and even booked the appointment, then changed her mind, cut off contact and withdrew the medical releases that let them speak to her doctors. Both versions are on the record. Neither has been tested at trial.

What is not disputed is what happened next. West travelled from Alaska to Texas, a state whose family law recognises the woman who gives birth as the legal mother. Her flights were paid for by an anti-abortion advocacy group, and she filed for custody in a Dallas court two days before delivery. The Texas Attorney General intervened. A California court had already ruled that Ahmed and Gilkar are the child's legal parents, and a California appeals court declined to pause that ruling.

The baby was born in Dallas on 12 August 2026. The couple call him Rumi; West and her supporters call him Gabriel. He underwent the Norwood procedure, the first of three surgeries HLHS typically requires, on 17 August. His condition remains, in his parents' lawyer's words, critical and complex. West says she was separated from him sixty seconds after birth and has not been allowed to hold him. The couple are separately suing her for breach of contract. The parties were due back in a Dallas County court on 25 August.

That is where things stand as I write this. Now let me tell you what I think you should actually take from it.

1. The contract is not the whole answer

This is the single most important thing, and it is the thing agencies are least likely to say out loud.

A surrogacy contract tells you what should happen. It does not, by itself, tell you what a court will make happen. Enforceability depends on the law of the place where someone actually asks a judge to enforce it, and in this case that has meant three different jurisdictions with three different legal cultures: Alaska, California and Texas.

Surrogacy agreements are enormously important. They force everyone to confront difficult possibilities before the pregnancy begins and to document their intentions while everyone is still thinking clearly and the situation remains hypothetical. But a contract cannot guarantee that a human being will never change their mind when faced with a real-life situation they had previously only imagined.

There is a further wrinkle that intended parents almost never understand until it is too late. Termination clauses are standard in gestational surrogacy agreements, but the part that says a surrogate must terminate is widely considered unenforceable. 

As Stephanie Caballero, the founder of The Surrogacy Law Center puts it, courts will not compel a pregnant woman to undergo a termination simply because she signed a contract saying she would, just as no clinic performs a transfer without current, informed consent. 

That is precisely why I don't think the lesson from this case is "contracts don't work." The lesson is that contracts are one layer of protection, not the entire protection.

A termination clause, for example, may establish what the parties agreed should happen in the event of a severe fetal diagnosis. But it cannot give intended parents absolute control over another person's body, and it cannot guarantee how that person will respond when the hypothetical becomes real.

What the contract can do is trigger financial consequences: damages, forfeited compensation, ended reimbursements. That is precisely the ground the Texas litigation is now being fought on, and lawyers following it have noted that courts have rarely been asked to enforce financial penalties in this exact situation.

So when your agency tells you "the contract covers termination," the honest follow-up question is: covers it how? Read what your surrogacy agency won't tell you if you want the longer version of this argument.

2. Ask exactly what happens if there is a disagreement during pregnancy

Not only about termination. That is one scenario out of dozens, and it is not even the most common one.

Ask about: refusal of prenatal diagnostic testing (this came up in the Alaska filings, where the couple argued that declined testing left doctors unable to plan properly), amniocentesis, vaccinations, travel restrictions, activity restrictions, choice of hospital, mode of delivery, who is in the delivery room, and, critically, who makes medical decisions in the minutes and days after birth.

Most intended parents I work with have discussed exactly one of these before matching. That is not enough. If you are at the beginning, my step-by-step guide to the process and the FAQ will give you the vocabulary to have these conversations properly.

3. Know the law where the surrogate is, not just where your agency is

Here is the geography of this case: the agency was in Connecticut, the surrogate lived in Alaska, the intended parents lived in California, the contract was signed in Alaska, and the birth happened in Texas.

Five jurisdictions touched a single journey. The agency's location turned out to be the least legally significant fact of all.

American surrogacy law is a state-by-state patchwork, which is exactly why surrogacy in the USA is not one legal product, but fifty. 

The same logic applies internationally. If you are comparing destinations, the relevant question is never "is this country pro-surrogacy?" but "what does the statute in this specific jurisdiction say about parentage, and when does it attach?" 

I have written about where surrogacy is legal in 2026 and the key things to compare between destinations precisely because this distinction gets flattened in marketing materials.

4. A change of location can completely change the legal picture

This is the point I would underline twice for international intended parents.

The entire shape of this dispute changed because of one relocation. Texas family law treats the woman who gives birth as the legal mother. Now, the couple can argue about how the relocation potentially harmed the baby by forcing him to begin cardiac treatment in one state and then be transferred to another, away from the Los Angeles team they had lined up.

So the question is not just "where is my surrogate?" It is: where will she be at 30 weeks, at 38 weeks, and at delivery, and what happens legally if that changes?

For those of you pursuing international surrogacy, this is not hypothetical. Programmes get relocated. Clinics move patients across borders mid-journey. Laws change underneath you. 

Kazakhstan closing to international intended parents is the most recent example, and it will not be the last. A journey that is legally clean in one country can become legally ambiguous the moment the birth happens somewhere else. This is one of the most common mistakes I see in international surrogacy.

5. Don't assume you automatically control every medical decision

Many intended parents arrive at their first consultation believing that because the embryo is genetically theirs, because they are paying, and because the contract names them as parents, they have decision-making authority over the pregnancy. 

In gestational surrogacy the genetic link matters enormously for parentage, but during pregnancy, the person in the medical chair is the surrogate, and her consent is what a doctor requires.

That is not a loophole. It is how medical consent works everywhere in the world. But it means that a good match is not just someone with a healthy uterus and a clean record. It is someone whose values on prenatal testing, anomalies, termination and intervention genuinely align with yours, established before an embryo is transferred, not after a diagnosis.

If you take nothing else from this article, take that. This dispute did not begin at the 20-week scan. It began at matching.

6. Ask about worst-case scenarios before you match

If an agency will only walk you through the happy path, that tells you something. Here are the questions I want my clients to ask, in these words:

• "Tell me exactly what happens if the surrogate disagrees with us about a medical decision."

• "What happens if she moves to another state or country during the pregnancy?"

• "What happens if she refuses a procedure or a test we have requested?"

• "What happens if she gives birth somewhere other than the planned location?"

• "Which court hears the dispute, and under which law?"

• "Has your agency ever had a dispute go to court? What happened?"

• "What happens to us if the agency itself closes mid-journey?"

That last one is not paranoia. 

I have written a whole guide on what to do when an agency folds, because it happens. My full list of questions to ask a surrogacy agency goes further, and how to choose an agency covers how to interpret the answers you get.

Watch how they respond, not just what they say. An agency that gets defensive when you ask about litigation is telling you how they will behave when you have a problem.

7. Rare does not mean impossible

I want to be careful here, because I do not want this article to frighten anyone out of a path that builds families every single day.

Disputes like this are genuinely unusual. Lawyers following the Texas litigation describe it as an outlier: courts have rarely been asked to resolve exactly this question. Most journeys involve none of it. My success stories page exists because the ordinary outcome is a healthy baby and two exhausted, delighted parents.

But there is a reason we cannot say precisely how rare these conflicts are: many surrogacy contracts carry confidentiality provisions, which makes reliable data on disputes difficult to gather. "Almost never happens" and "almost never gets reported" are not the same statement, and you should plan as though the second one might be closer to the truth.

Rare-but-devastating is exactly the risk profile that due diligence exists for.

For international intended parents, there is another layer: getting your child home.

What I would actually do if I were you

If you have not matched yet: slow down at the contract stage, not the clinic stage. That is where the risk lives.

Take the quiz if you want a structured starting point on surrogacy destination, or read through what applies to your situation, whether you are intended parents as a couple, a gay couple, a single parent.

If you are already mid-journey: do not panic, and do not assume your arrangement resembles this one. Pull out your agreement, find the clauses on medical decision-making, jurisdiction and delivery location, and have someone independent read them with you. If the answer to "which court decides?" is not immediately obvious from the document, that is the thing to resolve now rather than at 34 weeks.

And if you want a second pair of eyes from someone whose only interest is your outcome, that is exactly what I do. You can see how I work with clients or simply get in touch.