The California couple who asked a surrogate to abort their unborn son appeared in public for the first time Tuesday and used a Dallas courtroom to accuse the woman who refused that abortion of trying to take the baby she carried to birth.
Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, who call the newborn Rumi, sat across the courtroom from McKenna West, the 28-year-old Alaska cardiac nurse who calls the boy Gabriel.
Photographs of the couple were published as they arrived for the hearing. They left without speaking to reporters.
Gilkar broke down on the stand while attacking West, claiming she is mentally ill.
“He’s our child,” she said. “She’s trying to take him from us.”
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She sobbed as she told the judge West was trying to steal the child she and her husband hired West to carry. The court recessed so she could compose herself.
Gilkar said she turned to surrogacy after eight failed rounds of IVF and a hysterectomy. She said her body “gave up on me.”
“This was our only option,” she said. “We’ve never wanted anything more than this baby.”
Still wearing an orange hospital bracelet, she called the infant “the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen” and “the love of our lives.” She also said, “He’s suffering a lot.”
The couple’s lawyers argued that West was only a “carrier,” that a California court has already declared Gilkar and Ahmed the sole legal parents, and that West’s maternity claims should be dismissed.
They said West signed a surrogacy agreement allowing them to kill baby Gabriel in an abortion over “fetal abnormalities,” moved to Texas without their permission, and refused an amniocentesis they contend delayed the baby’s open-heart surgery.
Gilkar admitted she and her husband asked West to kill Gabriel after the baby was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a serious but treatable heart defect found at about 20 weeks. She denied that they refused, or intended to refuse, medical care after birth.
West testified that she refused the abortion because the child deserved to live.
“I knew that I wanted to protect him and I knew he deserved to be protected,” she told the court. “I knew that he deserved to be protected and that he deserved a chance.”
Through tears, she described the abortion procedure she would not undergo.
“It would have been a two-day procedure…they would have injected his heart with a solution that would stop it,” she said. She said the child’s dead body would have been removed two days later.“It was terrifying.”
West, a cardiac nurse and mother of two, has said the baby “had a great shot at survival if given the opportunity to receive the necessary treatment.”
“No woman should be forced to kill the baby inside her. Most importantly, every child deserves a chance to live,” she wrote.
Gabriel was born August 12. West has said she had only about a minute with him, while the umbilical cord was still attached, before he was taken away.
A court order has since barred her from seeing or holding the baby.
The infant had to be resuscitated at birth.
“When they tried to give him medicine, the tube came out and he stopped breathing and chaplain was called,” Gilkar sobbed.
The baby later underwent the Norwood procedure, the first of three staged surgeries used to treat the condition. A lawyer for the couple said it may be three to four weeks before doctors know whether the surgery worked and that the child would remain in critical care for at least another month.
After a hearing of nearly five hours, Dallas County Judge Ashley Wysocki left the restraining order in place for 14 days and issued no final custody ruling. She also sealed future matters in the case.
