The Ben Shapiro Show - August 14, 2026


The Surrogacy Dispute Tearing Reproductive Ethics Apart

Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
McKenna West Jessica Levinson Khloe Kardashian Tristan Thomas Omar Ahmad Ken Paxton Joe Rogan Lila Rose Gilcar
Everyone Is Getting the Democratic Primaries Wrong Race, the Media, and a Professor’s Suicide: This Story Is WILD

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

192.9

Word count

1,929

Sentence count

138

Harmful content

Misogyny

12

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Transcript

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Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 AOC announced her presidential campaign for 2028 by freezing her eggs on Instagram stories and got roundly mocked for it, rightfully so, because it was a weird thing to do.
00:00:07 Well, buckle up, because you're about to hear a wild story about a surrogacy and potential kidnapping, at least legally, across state lines that is breaking the internet right now.
00:00:15 So, this is an incredible story.
00:00:17 And what this story really is about in the end is the fact that when you separate apart all of the various parts of baby making from baby birthing and baby rearing, when you separate those things off as a matter of policy, Not as an exception to a general rule, but you say that it's a matter of moral apathy as to how babies are made, born, brought up, and all of this kind of stuff.
00:00:40 You end up with bizarre and kind of terrible stories like this one.
00:00:43 So there's a story out of California, KTLA reporting.
00:00:48 A baby born with a rare heart defect is at the center of a bitter legal dispute between the child's biological parents and the woman who gave birth to the baby as a surrogate against their wishes.
00:00:57 So again, this is insane now.
00:01:00 This is insane.
00:01:01 Gave birth to the baby against their wishes.
00:01:03 Why would your wishes for the death of a baby be relevant in this, in any context, let alone this one? 0.99
00:01:09 There's a woman in McKenna West. 0.99
00:01:11 She agreed to act as a surrogate for the LA couple, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilcar.
00:01:17 The couple opted to terminate the pregnancy at around 20 weeks. 0.99
00:01:20 So they operated to terminate a pregnancy in her stomach.
00:01:23 So you now have like a double violation of principle, right?
00:01:27 You're even violating the left wing, her body, her choice principle here, but you're also obviously trying to kill a baby.
00:01:35 They opted to terminate the pregnancy at around 20 weeks after it was revealed that the boy had a rare and life threatening congenital heart condition called hypoplastic left heart syndrome, in which the left side of the heart doesn't fully develop.
00:01:45 According to a copy of the surrogacy contract obtained by the Dallas Morning News, the document West signed allows for the intended parents to choose abortion in the case of a fetal anomaly.
00:01:54 But West refused to have the abortion and then she fled to Texas, where abortion is banned.
00:01:58 There, she sought specialists who could treat the baby's defect, according to the New York Times.
00:02:03 On August 12th, West gave birth to the baby in Dallas and is now seeking custody of the child.
00:02:08 So, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton got involved.
00:02:10 He took legal action, arguing in court that the biological parents were required to provide life saving medical care to the child under Texas law.
00:02:18 That court order was successfully issued on August 11th.
00:02:21 So, that meant that the life saving care had to be provided once the baby was born.
00:02:24 The order also barred West from presenting herself as the baby's parent or guardian and prevented her from making any medical decision on the child's behalf and from having any contact with the child after birth.
00:02:36 Although, West is now planning to continue pursuing custody.
00:02:39 The LA couple has not spoken publicly about the case.
00:02:41 They filed a lawsuit against her.
00:02:44 The KTLA legal analyst, a person named Jessica Levinson, said, You can sign a contract, but it's not clear that every provision is enforceable.
00:02:51 I think it is on legally very tenuous grounds because the gestational surrogate does have bodily autonomy, does have control over her body.
00:02:57 I think it would be very difficult to have a situation where the genetic parents force the gestational surrogate into aborting the child.
00:03:03 So again, this is a straight couple.
00:03:05 They decided to use a surrogate. 0.75
00:03:08 And now the fight is over.
00:03:10 Who the baby belongs to and whether they had the right to kill their genetic baby that was being carried in the stomach of another person.
00:03:17 That is what this case is about.
00:03:18 And it is pretty dicey territory when you start divvying up the various parts of baby making. 0.98
00:03:25 It was a lot cleaner when it was man, woman, get married, have sex, produce child, have child. 0.96
00:03:31 A lot easier. 0.74
00:03:33 And then we decided to create entire legal systems around the principle that you could, that you could just do this and also have the ability to essentially violate The rights of the child and of the surrogate.
00:03:48 Pretty insane stuff.
00:03:49 California surrogacy laws.
00:03:51 That is supposedly one of the most surrogacy friendly states in the nation.
00:03:56 Surrogacy contracts detail scenarios for abortion, including genetic defects and health risks.
00:04:00 If a surrogate refuses an abortion when requested by the parents, she can be financially penalized.
00:04:06 Now, in Texas, it is still illegal to perform the abortion, no matter what. 0.98
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00:05:19 It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in interstate court. 0.99
00:05:23 Here was the surrogate, McKenna West, saying that she was not going to have the abortion.
00:05:28 It was scary.
00:05:29 Facing financial ruin was scary, but.
00:05:35 Nothing was scarier than questioning my own soul and knowing what would happen to this baby boy if I flew to Seattle.
00:05:50 And his life doesn't have a price tag on it.
00:05:55 There's nothing that they could try to come after me for that would be worth his life.
00:06:05 That was McKenna West with Lila Rose, our friend over at Live Action.
00:06:09 Again, surrogacy is a very dicey proposition.
00:06:11 It gets even dicier.
00:06:13 It gets far dicier when it's optional.
00:06:15 Again, what I mean by that is that it's not infertility based.
00:06:18 It seems like in this case, it was infertility based.
00:06:19 And then the, the, there are multiple sort of moral questions.
00:06:22 One obviously is surrogacy itself.
00:06:24 Another one of those moral questions is they had a provision in their contract so they could abort the baby if the baby was damaged.
00:06:31 And that's how you end up in that fight.
00:06:33 But this particular, I gotta say, It is particularly bizarre and insane.
00:06:38 It's certainly not a matter of moral apathy.
00:06:43 And when you treat it as a matter of moral apathy, then basically human life becomes a handbag, which is what has happened a lot in Hollywood. 1.00
00:06:49 You're seeing a bunch of women who just don't feel like, quote unquote, distorting their bodies.
00:06:53 By the way, just point out women having babies is not distorting your body, it is using your body in the greatest possible fashion it is possible to use a human body. 0.51
00:07:02 A woman having a baby is literally what the female body was built for. 0.99
00:07:08 Okay, that is what it was built for. 1.00
00:07:09 It's why it's built differently than a male body.
00:07:10 Doesn't mean it's the only thing for which you can use your body or anything like that. 0.93
00:07:14 But clearly, the natural process of having a baby is part of being a woman.
00:07:19 Like, that literally is what defines.
00:07:21 When people ask, what is a woman? 1.00
00:07:22 The answer is the being that produces the large piece of genetic material that turns into a baby. 1.00
00:07:31 That is the answer to that question.
00:07:35 Okay, so in any case, where I start to get, I mean, this case is in and of itself insane, right?
00:07:40 Because you're talking about.
00:07:41 Aborting a baby that's 20 weeks old because of a heart defect.
00:07:44 I have sort of a personal stake in that beyond just the normal.
00:07:48 My oldest child, as I've discussed before, had a heart defect.
00:07:51 She had to have open heart surgery when she was a year and a half old.
00:07:53 She's wonderful.
00:07:54 She's 12 years old now.
00:07:56 Everything's cool.
00:07:57 But even if it had not been cool, she's an independent human being with an independent interest in life.
00:08:01 It's crazy.
00:08:02 It's crazy.
00:08:03 But this becomes even crazier when you just have people who are wedded to the idea that surrogacy is just a matter of, again, buying a Chanel handbag because they don't wish for their tummy to be a little bit protrudy after the pregnancy.
00:08:03 Okay.
00:08:21 This is Khloe Kardashian and Tristan Thomas finding out, but this is amazing.
00:08:25 They actually went and got a surrogate.
00:08:28 This is not for infertility reasons.
00:08:30 And then they found out the surrogate could abort their child because it turns out that in California, a surrogate can't abort without the permission of the people who have paid for the surrogacy.
00:08:39 And they were shocked.
00:08:42 What are your beliefs about fetal reduction or termination of pregnancy due to multiple pregnancies?
00:08:49 Say the embryo splitting, the surrogate was carrying twins suddenly.
00:08:52 If we are blessed to have multiples, we think that's in God's will.
00:08:56 So we're on board with that.
00:08:57 And what if your surrogate wasn't on board with that?
00:09:01 But don't they have to kind of go with what our wishes are?
00:09:07 Well, it's your baby, but it's her body. 0.71
00:09:08 So she could terminate the pregnancy with any unplanned outcome.
00:09:15 Yeah, this would be the problem.
00:09:17 This would be the problem right there, I noticed.
00:09:20 Again, brave new worlding comes with risks.
00:09:25 It comes with risks. 1.00
00:09:25 And one of the things that we do as a society is we look at very sympathetic cases, infertile couples, and then we say, okay, what is a system we can build for those infertile couples? 1.00
00:09:33 And then we don't allow that to just even be the system.
00:09:35 Even if you agree with the system, we don't allow that just to be the system for infertile couples.
00:09:38 We say it's applicable to everyone.
00:09:41 And that's how you end up with the, again, very famous legal phrase hard cases make bad law.
00:09:46 And that is a wild case out of California and Texas.
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