An Alaskan nurse, McKenna West, agreed to become a surrogate for a Californian couple for $60,000, with a contract clause allowing the genetic parents to demand an abortion if defects were found.
When a serious but treatable heart condition appeared at five months, she was contractually obligated to abort—so she fled to Texas, where abortion is banned and birth mothers are legally recognized as mothers, and gave birth to a boy she named Gabriel West. The buyers had already won recognition in California courts as the unborn baby's parents: they wanted the child transferred to California not for treatment, but to let him die. Under Brazilian law, depriving a child of necessary medical treatment would be attempted murder—yet the child survived only thanks to two Texas court orders letting McKenna authorize surgery. Without a dissenting state, the US would have sanctioned homicide by omission. At 28, McKenna was already a single mother of two; Nasheen, a wealthy woman in her forties, knew nothing of carrying a child yet alone held decision-making rights under the contract—her relationship to motherhood akin to ordering on Amazon.
Since Texas is not a country, the couple still asserts rights over the baby they call Rumi: he was taken from McKenna and handed over, and—not content with keeping him free after a breach of contract—they are suing her for $100,000 for "kidnapping" the very child they wanted to kill.
Gabriel's health has now deteriorated; if there is logic to this madness, the parents will kill this baby—with America's blessing—before any legal resolution improves his life.
After a long humanitarian tradition of caring for the poor and the sick—initiated by early Christianity and strengthened during the Middle Ages—the Calvinists' liberal political experiment invented this right to homicide by omission. Only the 'elect' get to go to the hospital.
💬 Read more by Bruna Frascolla
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