A surrogate from Alaska who is engaged in a custody battle over a baby with a severe heart defect has asked the Supreme Court to intervene after a Texas court ruled against her custody bid in a complicated multistate surrogacy case that has drawn the involvement of anti-abortion groups.

The surrogate, McKenna West, is asking the high court to halt a California ruling upheld by a Texas court on Sept. 2 that grants custody to California couple Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, the baby’s biological parents.

West has argued that the couple pressured her to have an abortion after the fetus was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a rare congenital heart condition, and that she should have final custody because she does not believe that the couple will provide life-saving care to the newborn.

Dallas County District Judge Ashley Wysocki last week held up an earlier California ruling that sided with the biological parents, but because the case has been sealed, the decision was not publicly available, The Texas Tribune reported. A court-appointed attorney for the child successfully filed a motion to seal court proceedings in August and criticized West for writing an op-ed about the case.

In her emergency application to the Supreme Court, West says the newborn could be removed from Texas to California for hospice “despite his treatable condition” around Sept. 17.

Justice Elena Kagan, who is the justice assigned to field emergency litigation from California, has already signaled that the high court will not grant urgent relief by then. On Friday, the justice requested that the opposing side respond to the application by 4 p.m. ET on Sept. 18. The high court is therefore not expected to act on the application until sometime after that response comes in.

The baby, named Rumi by Gilkar and Ahmed, and known as Gabriel by West, was born Aug. 12 in Texas amid a wrenching legal battle between the two parties.

After the fetus’ diagnosis, Gilkar and Ahmed say, they and West initially agreed to terminate the pregnancy, as allowed under their contract. West then changed her mind, according to the couple; she traveled to Texas, where abortion is illegal, with financial assistance from national anti-abortion organization Live Action. Despite the couple’s plea that she deliver in California, they said, West gave birth in Texas.

West, however, has argued that the contract she signed with the couple was coercive and had asked for Wysocki to grant her parentage. She testified that she did not believe the couple would continue to seek care for the newborn because they wanted to terminate the pregnancy.

Gilkar, in her testimony, disputed that she would not pursue medical care for the child. “We’ve never wanted anything more than this baby,” she said, adding that the baby has struggled to breathe since receiving the first of three open-heart surgeries.

“He’s our child,” she said, accusing West of “trying to take him from us.”

Anti-abortion advocates have gotten involved in the case to advance their effort to establish rights for embryos and expand abortion bans. Among West’s representatives in her Supreme Court application are lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that has argued several culture-war-related cases before the Supreme Court. Her application is also supported by amicus briefs from the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the anti-abortion law firm Americans United for Life.

But the legal issue raised by West’s appeal to the high court does not concern abortion rights. Rather, her lawyers argue that the California court ruling against her violated her due process protections because she never consented to its jurisdiction.

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