The Ben Shapiro Show - August 14, 2026


The Surrogacy Dispute Tearing Reproductive Ethics Apart


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

192.9

Word count

1,929

Sentence count

133


Transcript

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00:00:00.000 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.
00:00:07.000 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.
00:00:15.000 So, this is an incredible story.
00:00:17.000 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.
00:00:40.000 You end up with bizarre and kind of terrible stories like this one.
00:00:43.000 So there's a story out of California, KTLA reporting.
00:00:48.000 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.
00:00:57.000 So again, this is insane now.
00:01:00.000 This is insane.
00:01:01.000 Gave birth to the baby against their wishes.
00:01:03.000 Why would your wishes for the death of a baby be relevant in this, in any context, let alone this one?
00:01:09.000 There's a woman in McKenna West.
00:01:11.000 She agreed to act as a surrogate for the LA couple, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilcar.
00:01:17.000 The couple opted to terminate the pregnancy at around 20 weeks.
00:01:20.000 So they operated to terminate a pregnancy in her stomach.
00:01:23.000 So you now have like a double violation of principle, right?
00:01:27.000 You're even violating the left wing, her body, her choice principle here, but you're also obviously trying to kill a baby.
00:01:35.000 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.
00:01:45.000 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.
00:01:54.000 But West refused to have the abortion and then she fled to Texas, where abortion is banned.
00:01:58.000 There, she sought specialists who could treat the baby's defect, according to the New York Times.
00:02:03.000 On August 12th, West gave birth to the baby in Dallas and is now seeking custody of the child.
00:02:08.000 So, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton got involved.
00:02:10.000 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.
00:02:18.000 That court order was successfully issued on August 11th.
00:02:21.000 So, that meant that the life saving care had to be provided once the baby was born.
00:02:24.000 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.
00:02:36.000 Although, West is now planning to continue pursuing custody.
00:02:39.000 The LA couple has not spoken publicly about the case.
00:02:41.000 They filed a lawsuit against her.
00:02:44.000 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.
00:02:51.000 I think it is on legally very tenuous grounds because the gestational surrogate does have bodily autonomy, does have control over her body.
00:02:57.000 I think it would be very difficult to have a situation where the genetic parents force the gestational surrogate into aborting the child.
00:03:03.000 So again, this is a straight couple.
00:03:05.000 They decided to use a surrogate.
00:03:08.000 And now the fight is over.
00:03:10.000 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.
00:03:17.000 That is what this case is about.
00:03:18.000 And it is pretty dicey territory when you start divvying up the various parts of baby making.
00:03:25.000 It was a lot cleaner when it was man, woman, get married, have sex, produce child, have child.
00:03:31.000 A lot easier.
00:03:33.000 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.
00:03:48.000 Pretty insane stuff.
00:03:49.000 California surrogacy laws.
00:03:51.000 That is supposedly one of the most surrogacy friendly states in the nation.
00:03:56.000 Surrogacy contracts detail scenarios for abortion, including genetic defects and health risks.
00:04:00.000 If a surrogate refuses an abortion when requested by the parents, she can be financially penalized.
00:04:06.000 Now, in Texas, it is still illegal to perform the abortion, no matter what.
00:04:10.000 All right, coming up, we'll get to the fourth reason why it is stupid to chase around Joe Rogan's audience as a politician.
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00:05:19.000 It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in interstate court.
00:05:23.000 Here was the surrogate, McKenna West, saying that she was not going to have the abortion.
00:05:28.000 It was scary.
00:05:29.000 Facing financial ruin was scary, but.
00:05:35.000 Nothing was scarier than questioning my own soul and knowing what would happen to this baby boy if I flew to Seattle.
00:05:50.000 And his life doesn't have a price tag on it.
00:05:55.000 There's nothing that they could try to come after me for that would be worth his life.
00:06:05.000 That was McKenna West with Lila Rose, our friend over at Live Action.
00:06:09.000 Again, surrogacy is a very dicey proposition.
00:06:11.000 It gets even dicier.
00:06:13.000 It gets far dicier when it's optional.
00:06:15.000 Again, what I mean by that is that it's not infertility based.
00:06:18.000 It seems like in this case, it was infertility based.
00:06:19.000 And then the, the, there are multiple sort of moral questions.
00:06:22.000 One obviously is surrogacy itself.
00:06:24.000 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.
00:06:31.000 And that's how you end up in that fight.
00:06:33.000 But this particular, I gotta say, It is particularly bizarre and insane.
00:06:38.000 It's certainly not a matter of moral apathy.
00:06:43.000 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.
00:06:49.000 You're seeing a bunch of women who just don't feel like, quote unquote, distorting their bodies.
00:06:53.000 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.
00:07:02.000 A woman having a baby is literally what the female body was built for.
00:07:08.000 Okay, that is what it was built for.
00:07:09.000 It's why it's built differently than a male body.
00:07:10.000 Doesn't mean it's the only thing for which you can use your body or anything like that.
00:07:14.000 But clearly, the natural process of having a baby is part of being a woman.
00:07:19.000 Like, that literally is what defines.
00:07:21.000 When people ask, what is a woman?
00:07:22.000 The answer is the being that produces the large piece of genetic material that turns into a baby.
00:07:31.000 That is the answer to that question.
00:07:35.000 Okay, so in any case, where I start to get, I mean, this case is in and of itself insane, right?
00:07:40.000 Because you're talking about.
00:07:41.000 Aborting a baby that's 20 weeks old because of a heart defect.
00:07:44.000 I have sort of a personal stake in that beyond just the normal.
00:07:48.000 My oldest child, as I've discussed before, had a heart defect.
00:07:51.000 She had to have open heart surgery when she was a year and a half old.
00:07:53.000 She's wonderful.
00:07:54.000 She's 12 years old now.
00:07:56.000 Everything's cool.
00:07:57.000 But even if it had not been cool, she's an independent human being with an independent interest in life.
00:08:01.000 It's crazy.
00:08:02.000 It's crazy.
00:08:03.000 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.
00:08:03.000 Okay.
00:08:21.000 This is Khloe Kardashian and Tristan Thomas finding out, but this is amazing.
00:08:25.000 They actually went and got a surrogate.
00:08:28.000 This is not for infertility reasons.
00:08:30.000 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.
00:08:39.000 And they were shocked.
00:08:42.000 What are your beliefs about fetal reduction or termination of pregnancy due to multiple pregnancies?
00:08:49.000 Say the embryo splitting, the surrogate was carrying twins suddenly.
00:08:52.000 If we are blessed to have multiples, we think that's in God's will.
00:08:56.000 So we're on board with that.
00:08:57.000 And what if your surrogate wasn't on board with that?
00:09:01.000 But don't they have to kind of go with what our wishes are?
00:09:07.000 Well, it's your baby, but it's her body.
00:09:08.000 So she could terminate the pregnancy with any unplanned outcome.
00:09:15.000 Yeah, this would be the problem.
00:09:17.000 This would be the problem right there, I noticed.
00:09:20.000 Again, brave new worlding comes with risks.
00:09:25.000 It comes with risks.
00:09:25.000 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?
00:09:33.000 And then we don't allow that to just even be the system.
00:09:35.000 Even if you agree with the system, we don't allow that just to be the system for infertile couples.
00:09:38.000 We say it's applicable to everyone.
00:09:41.000 And that's how you end up with the, again, very famous legal phrase hard cases make bad law.
00:09:46.000 And that is a wild case out of California and Texas.
00:09:50.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
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