Hollywood actress, writer, and producer Lena Dunham is welcoming her first baby into the world, despite saying in the past that abortion is “a huge part of who I am.”
Dunham and her husband Luis Felber, who married in 2021, announced the addition to their family this week in a Vogue op-ed.
The Girls actress did not carry the child herself due to a hysterectomy she had in 2018 because of her battle with endometriosis. So, the couple engaged a surrogate for their baby.
“Some people don’t dream about being mothers, but I had, and it was a big part of my identity that I was going to do it someday in that way,” Dunham said in April, according to People.
“I found myself kneeling by an exam table, fresh off a red-eye — with a rictus grin of anxious enthusiasm plastered on the lower half of my face while my eyes filled with anxious tears — clutching the hand of a woman I had met in person only twice,” she wrote of her surrogacy experience.
“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 added.
When the child was born, Dunham noted how amazed she was by it all, writing, “Hello. I’m your mama. You … you look nothing like I thought you would, but exactly right. We’ve been waiting for you, do you know that? It was so nice of you to come.”
If being a mother is “a big part” of her “identity,” that seems to clash quite thoroughly with another “huge part” of her “identity” that she spoke of a decade ago.
Back in 2016, Dunham was patting herself on the back for her “bravery” and “self-knowledge” over her support for abortion on demand and at any time. She even dreamily wished she had an abortion herself.
“I always thought that I myself didn’t stigmatize abortion,” Dunham says in the most recent episode of her podcast, titled “Choice.”I’m a – uh abortion rights activist, it’s a huge part of who I am, she said on her podcast at the time.
But one day, when I was visiting a Planned Parenthood in Texas a few years ago, a young girl walked up to me and asked me if I’d like to be a part of her project in which women share their stories of abortions. I sort of jumped. “I haven’t had an abortion,” I told her. I wanted to make it really clear to her that as much as I was going out and fighting for other women’s options, I myself had never had an abortion.
And I realized then that even I was carrying within myself stigma around this issue. Even I, the woman who cares as much as anybody about a woman’s right to choose, felt it was important that people know I was unblemished in this department.
“So many people I love – my mother, my best friends – have had to have abortions for all kinds of reasons,” Dunham said. “I feel so proud of them for their bravery, for their self-knowledge, and it was a really important moment for me then to realize I had internalized some of what society was throwing at us and I had to put it in the garbage.”
“Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had,” she added.
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