Laura, aka X-23, is the only mutant worthy to be Wolverine's successor in the X-Men franchise. And I'm not just saying that because she was (spoiler alert) created using Wolverine's DNA. In Logan, Laura proves herself to be fearless, resourceful, a little bit prone to rage and murder, but all in all, pretty reasonable. She's a bit of a hot head, not unlike Logan himself, and fights with the kind of reckless abandon that can only be felt when one has the power to heal any wound instantly. Despite not growing up with Wolverine, Laura is every bit her father's daughter, which raises the question, who is Laura's mother in Logan?
When Wolverine first meets Laura in Logan, she's hovering around the Mexican border with Gabriella, a nurse who tells Wolverine she is Laura's mother and needs his help to get to North Dakota. Later, of course, Logan learns that Gabriella was not Laura's mother. In fact, Laura doesn't have a mother in Logan, at least not one that she has ever known. In footage provided by Gabriella of Transigen, the facility where X-23 was created and raised, it is revealed that the company would recruit young women to act as surrogates for their mutant clone babies. Once they gave birth, however, they were never heard from again.
Knowing what we know about Transigen and their heartless ways (the entire plot of Logan revolves around them hunting down children to execute them), it's likely that Laura's birth mother was killed by Transigen after she had given birth. Her body will never be found, her name will remain a mystery. Unless, that is, there's more planned for X-23. The ending of Logan (slight spoiler alert) leaves plenty of room for a potential sequel following Laura's story. Given her desire for a father-daughter connection with Wolverine in Logan, it wouldn't be surprising if she went looking for her mother sometime in the future.
In the comics, X-23's mother was Doctor Sarah Kinney, a woman who worked at the revamped Weapon X project that conducted experiments on mutants. Dr. Kinney suggested they try to create a female clone of Wolverine and was forced to be a surrogate for X-23. Unlike the X-23 in the film, the one in the comics was partially raised by her mother, though still raised in captivity and trained to be a weapon by Dr. Rice, who does appear in Logan. Kinney died when Dr. Rice manipulated X-23 into killing her own mother, and it was Kinney who gave X-23 the name Laura before she died.
I know what you're thinking: this is a pretty cinematic story to leave on the cutting room floor. And yet, Logan appears to take a sharp turn away from this X-23 origin story. Dr. Kinney is not in Logan, and it doesn't look like the filmmakers had any intention of bringing her in.
