The US Supreme Court has refused to intervene in a custody dispute involving a surrogate who refused an abortion request from the parents who hired her to have their baby.
Justice Elena Kagan declined an emergency appeal filed by McKenna West asking the court to halt a previous ruling granting parental rights to the California couple.
The parents had asked West to abort the pregnancy after a scan at 20 weeks showed the foetus had a severe heart defect. West instead went to Texas where nearly all abortions are illegal and gave birth to the child.
The court’s decision leaves in place an earlier order that granted custody to the parents.
The BBC has contacted lawyers for both parties for comment.
West has been seeking custody over the baby, which was born last month with hypoplastic left heart syndrome – a defect where the left side of the heart cannot pump enough blood to the body.
The condition often requires multiple surgeries, which are not a cure. Infants with the condition can have lifelong complications, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
West – who has been supported by several Republican officials – travelled to Texas, where the state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton intervened in the case and won an emergency court order requiring that the boy receive medical care in the state. He had surgery soon after birth.
West said she denied the parents’, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, requests to have the abortion after learning of treatment options and wanting to keep “this precious baby”, according to the Supreme Court filing.
West argued that the biological parents should not have custody because she worried they would not give the boy the necessary medical care since they sought to abort the child after learning of the life-threatening condition.
In a previous court hearing, Gilkar said the baby – whom they named Rumi – was “our child” and “the love of our lives”, according to the Associated Press. They said West travelled to Texas without telling them and blocked their access to medical information.
A California court previously granted parental rights to Ahmed and Gilkar, while a Texas court issued a restraining order blocking West from seeing the baby.
Last month, an attorney for the California couple said the child was in critical condition and seemed to be “suffering from potential complications”.
West argued that without intervention from the Supreme Court, she would no longer have access to information about the child’s medical condition.
In the filing, lawyers for West suggested that the California couple could place the child in hospice care.
