Lena Dunham Welcomes Baby Via Surrogate With Husband Luis Felber
What To Know
- Lena Dunham wrote an essay revealing she welcomed her first child with husband Luis Felber.
- She had her daughter via surrogacy.
- Dunham said she had 12 years of fertility struggles before her baby was born.
Lena Dunham is embarking on a new adventure: motherhood!
The Girls creator penned a September 16 essay for Vogue revealing that she’d welcomed her first child with husband Luis Felber, detailing her surrogacy journey from the start to her daughter’s birth.
Dunham described the waiting process and bonding with her surrogate, whom she kept anonymous. The actress-director-writer-producer shared that she spent 12 years “circling the fertility drain” before her daughter was born.
“With my husband out of town, I had brought my mother to meet [the surrogate] and her partner, and we sat in a coffee shop in Cobble Hill holding our matchas like props as we talked — about our lives, her children, the reasons she wanted to undertake this ‘journey,’ as they so love to call it in fertility medicine,” Dunham wrote.
The 40-year-old also described her feelings related to surrogacy. “In the months before the embryo transfer date, as I got to know our surrogate and to trust her, the feelings I thought would be there somehow weren’t: namely jealousy, that this woman could do for a child — for my child — what I could not… Instead, I felt a different kind of jealousy — toward said baby, for the chance to be tucked into someone who radiated such safety.”
Dunham was present for her daughter’s birth, which occurred 13 days later than planned. “I sat on a hospital bed, between the legs of a woman I hadn’t known a year ago, waiting for a glimpse of this person who I had been waiting for with something related to patience, but also none at all,” she recalled. “I was so focused on our surrogate — in awe at her concentration, her period of quiet followed by what sounded like a roar—I forgot to look down until I heard our baby’s cry.”
Dunham also wrote of the support Felber, a musician whom she met in London and married in 2021, provided during the surrogacy process. In an essay for British Vogue, Dunham described being set up with him by a friend after a previous relationship went wrong. Felber and Dunham would go on to co-create her loosely semi-autobiographical series Too Much.
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“I would ask this man hard questions, and I would really hear him when he answered, slowly and deliberately, sometimes telling me things he knew I wouldn’t want to hear, but doing it anyway (which I’ve come to think is love.),” she wrote of their romance.
