On Tuesday, a court in Dallas, Texas will convene to decide the fate of a small baby called Gabriel or Rumi, depending on who you believe his mother is. Gabriel-Rumi is at present a sort of Schrödinger’s baby, suspended between possible futures and suspended also, poor sod, between life and death: born with heart disease, headed now for surgery.
Gabriel-Rumi’s short life has so far been the subject of a media frenzy, for reasons I’ll explain, but should he later look back and be appalled at all the fuss, I’d like him to know what a service he’s already done the world.
A woman who carries a child isn’t just storage – she’s bonded and the baby feels that bond too
The global surrogacy business surges on, valued at almost $40 billion, heading for $300 billion by 2030; an accelerating factory belt of babies commissioned, grown, sold. No one who profits from it wants to pause the gravy train or look too hard for harm. But the case of baby Gabriel-Rumi makes the cost of surrogacy – all surrogacy – painfully clear.
Gabriel-Rumi’s biological parents, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, are from California. They conceived using IVF and decided, for unknown reasons, to use a surrogate. Perhaps Nausheen couldn’t carry the baby, or perhaps, like a growing number of western women, she’d put in the hard yards at the gym, looked hot on her socials and didn’t fancy stretch marks. Some women now use surrogates because they’re freaked out by the thought of labour. ‘Social surrogacy’, it’s called, to distinguish it from the medical sort. Is it morally right to outsource physical pain?
