A surrogate mother, sued for refusing to abort a child with a sick heart

A California couple is suing the woman who carried their child and is demanding more than one hundred thousand dollars from her. Their grievance comes down to a single word: she refused to abort. The gestational contract they had signed stipulated that they could require the abortion if the child presented an anomaly. In April the boy was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a grave but treatable malformation. The surrogate, McKenna West, a cardiology nurse, refused to have him killed. The couple then stopped paying the costs of the pregnancy.

She gave birth on 12 August in Dallas, after taking refuge in Texas to place the child under that state's protection. She named him Gabriel; the biological parents call him Rumi. She says she had only about a minute with the newborn before they took custody, and today she is deprived of all contact with him. The child has undergone a first heart operation and receives care under a court order that mandates the life-saving treatment and forbids that he be taken out of the state.

West declares that she renounces every claim on the child and asks only one thing: that the couple commit to giving him this treatment, which she says she sees them seeking to have set aside. "No woman should be forced to kill the child she carries," she says. "And above all, every child deserves a chance to live." Through their lawyer, the parents say they are "devastated" to see the case "turned into political theater," and affirm that they are following the medical team's advice and putting the child's health before all else. A hearing on parentage is set for 25 August in Dallas.

What the law of God teaches

The fifth commandment knows no exception of age. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that these words, "Thou shalt not kill," absolutely forbid homicide, and it expressly ranks among the guilty the man who, by striking a pregnant woman, causes the death of the child she carries. The child yet unborn is not the promise of a man: he is a man, and his life is under the same guard as our own.

The same Catechism recalls why God instituted marriage. Children are its first good, desired "less, it is true, to leave heirs of one's goods and riches, than to give to God believing and faithful servants"; and it teaches that they commit a very grave fault who voluntarily oppose themselves to this end of marriage. The child is a gift received, not a work ordered.

The measure

Two ruptures are to be read here in the light of this doctrine.

First, a clause that authorizes ordering the death of a child judged "abnormal" is not a clause: it is the stipulation of a homicide, and no contract can oblige anyone to kill an innocent. To require the abortion of this boy because his heart was sick was to require his death. In refusing, the woman who carried him did not fail a moral obligation: she obeyed the only one that bound her. What the law of men calls a breach of contract, the law of God calls the refusal of a murder.

Second, the whole arrangement overturns the order of marriage as God willed it. The child is no longer received there, he is ordered; he is no longer a gift, he has a price; and when he does not arrive intact, they mean to send him back like defective merchandise and to stop paying his freight. This is why the Church holds surrogacy to be gravely immoral: not out of severity, but because the practice treats a person as a product and reduces a mother to a means.

What to take from it

A Catholic need not await the verdict of a court to know where the good lies in this affair. The child conceived is a person from the first instant, never an article of order; his life depends neither on a clause nor on a diagnosis. The woman who refused to have him killed did what the law of God commands, at the price we can see. No signature ever obliges the shedding of innocent blood, and no "defect" strips a child of his right to live and to be cared for. Parentage, costs, and mutual wrongs fall to the judges; the measure of good and evil was fixed before any contract was written.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill"; and on the Sacrament of Matrimony, on the ends of marriage and its first good, children. Genesis, i, 28, "Increase and multiply," according to the Vulgate.