For those of us paying attention to the current travails of Baby Gabriel and the courageous love of life shown by his birth mother, [1-3] we are seeing the perdition of Americans’ missteps of being infatuated with the fallacy of human perfection and legalizing abortion.  Gabriel’s conception parents hired his birth mother to be a surrogate for his gestation.  Their surrogacy agreement gave his conception parents power of attorney to decide matters of life and death for Gabriel, including ending his life before birth if they felt a reason to do so.  They did.

 

 

The reason they came to feel this way was that he grew up with a congenital defect in his heart.  In their view, this was an imperfection that made them no longer willing to be his parents.  But they went further, deciding he was not fit to live.  They informed his birth mother that she should abort him in the same manner that Spartans threw newborns judged to be imperfect off the high cliffs beyond their proud city.  Spartans walked away as their own children, deemed too imperfect to be held, died horrible deaths at the foot of their cliffs.

 

 

But Gabriel’s birth mother said “No,” in violation of her agreement.  Her refusal to abort Gabriel, as his conception parents demanded, was their legal right and a greater moral act than just protecting Gabriel.  She refused because of her conviction that aborting babies because they are imperfect is simply wrong, and she could not in good conscience do it.

 

 

Because we live in a nation where some states allow such Spartan acts, Gabriel’s birth mother had to flee to a life-affirming state, Texas.  Fortunately for her and Gabriel, Texas’ attorney general worked quickly to shield them from Gabriel’s conception parents, their lawyers, and abortion proponents.[2] In Texas, where anomalous hearts of little babies are repaired instead of given to fetal organ peddlers after abortions, she was able to give birth to Gabriel and ensure that he received the medical care he needed.

 

 

Gabriel’s mother’s brave flight is not unlike that of America’s slaves before their emancipation.  Abortion has now replaced slavery as America’s latest “peculiar institution.”  Kenneth Stampp's 1956 book of the title, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South,[4] references the usages by pro-slavery statesman John C. Calhoun in 1830 and the shrewdly observant language of Mark Twain in 1861.  It is a very apt juxtaposition for modern-day abortion.  The peculiar things about American slavery that Stampp described were 1) its portrayal of a horrible human victimization as being good for the victims and good for society; 2) it being a prima facie constitutional contradiction to the founding principles of a democratic free human society; and 3) its creation of slave states and free states.  All three of these peculiarities of past American slavery are quite analogous features of American abortion.

 

 

There is no credible argument that Gabriel’s mother did not prevent him from becoming one of the more than one million children who are victims of abortion each year in America. [5] There is nothing good about abortion for these lost children.  Pro-abortion groups have promoted “pro-choice” propaganda in an attempt to normalize abortion as being simply pro-woman, promising to elevate women to greater economic and political power.  But they completely ignore the deaths of women’s children and abortion’s significant potential for injury to women, their families, and greater American society, which continues to be poorly researched [6].  Like slavery, abortion is a social scourge in America, with the only benefit going to those who profit from the exploitation and death of its many human victims.

 

 

Modeling slave owners, institutions like Roe cast doubt on the humanity of its victims to disarm the prima facie contradiction with our constitutional principle that all human beings are created equal with a right to their lives.  Even after the Dobbs Court unmasked the scientifically ridiculous, yet amazingly successful, ruse that somehow unborn children like Gabriel might not be living human beings, [7] it balked short of finally setting us all free.  The Court failed Baby Gabriel before he was even conceived, leaving his birth mother to negotiate the minefield of pro-abortion states as she tried to get him to a safe state.

 

 

We should all take a pause and deeply ponder the moral and social meaning of a free nation permitting legal contracts like the one currently in dispute regarding Gabriel’s life and future.  What does it mean that we allow anyone to pre-ordain the right to end another person’s life, let alone demand that the birth mother commit the act for them?  Surely there is a grave constitutional error with such legal arrangements.  Yet, it is no graver than the recent passing of Massachusetts’ new bill allowing babies to be aborted at any time that parents and their physicians agree to do so.[8]

 

 

When these poor children are thrown from the abortion cliffs of Massachusetts, there will be no person of moral conviction like Gabriel’s mother to save them.  But we can be their salvation by insisting that the U.S. Supreme Court finish what it started in Dobbs.  The Court must revisit abortion and rectify its peculiar contradiction with our precious Constitution.  Our Civil War history teaches us that states cannot come to a peaceful resolution of such profound differences in opinions, attitudes, and beliefs.  The love of money is too powerful an adversary to the love of humanity.  But in the same way that moral persistence has pushed our courts to meet their responsibility to rescue and ensure other equalities endowed by our constitution, our moral persistence can get us to a day when children like Baby Gabriel, and his Texas mother, will be supported with our best available care, without any other thought.

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1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/26/baby-surrogacy-case-critical-condition

2. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/12/texas-surrogacy-california-alaska-parental-rights/

3. https://nypost.com/2026/08/25/us-news/biological-mother-in-surrogate-baby-battle-claims-mckenna-west-trying-to-steal-her-child-as-she-sobs-in-court/

4. Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.

5. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-united-states

6. https://lozierinstitute.org/fact-sheet-abortion-and-mental-health/

7. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

8. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/06/opinion/late-term-abortion-bill-massachusetts/?p1=StaffPage&p1=Article_Inline_Text_Link

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