A surrogate is fighting for custody of a baby she carried to term after claiming she had an affair with the child's father.
Per court documents obtained by The Daily Beast, the woman in question hails from British Columbia in Canada, and is referred to purely by the initials "K.B." to protect her identity.
K.B. claims that she met the father, who had been married to his wife for five years at the time, in 2014 and the pair began having an affair shortly afterwards.
During the affair, K.B. alleges that she fell pregnant twice but terminated each pregnancy via abortion.
Despite their complicated history, K.B. claims that she wanted to help the father, referred to as M.S.B in court documents, after learning he and his wife were having problems conceiving and agreed to be the couple's surrogate.
However, after a failed attempt to inseminate her artificially, K.B alleges that M.S.B. asked her to consider falling pregnant with his child naturally.
At the time, the duo were allegedly still having an affair with M.S.B. reportedly promising to leave his wife for K.B. after the baby was born with the intention that they would raise the child together instead as husband and wife.
But fast forward for years and M.S.B has not left his wife and the couple are now denying K.B. any visitation rights at all.
K.B. is now contesting this in the province’s top court, claiming she had a maternal role in the child’s life during the baby's first two years: breastfeeding her, changing diapers and seeing her around six times per week.
With regards to her decision to sign an agreement in which she handed over full custody to the couple, K.B. insists she only did this as she believed it was necessary for her daughter to receive health insurance.
However, M.S.B and his wife forced the surrogate to cut contact after she began making "progressively greater demands" such as a $100,000 payment and scheduled visits with the child.
Court documents show that presiding judge, Supreme Court Justice Warren Milman, said: "Given the highly unusual facts of this case, there is no comparable precedent driving me to any particular result on this issue."
Despite this, he ultimately ruled that the child needed stability and that contact with K.B. would not currently be in the child's best interests.
He concluded: "KB has not met the burden she carries to show that an order allowing her to resume contact with [the child] at this stage would be in [the child's] best interests. It follows that her application must be refused."
