11 Celebs Who Shared Why They Chose Surrogacy

While surrogacy has become more common in recent years, there are still many people who don’t truly understand the process. That can lead to a critical view of surrogacy, which can be detrimental to the families who need it. That’s why many celebrities are now speaking out to share their surrogacy stories — and explain exactly why they chose a gestational carrier to give them the gift of life.

Find out why these stars chose to use a surrogate…

Gabrielle Union says she chose surrogacy after facing years of fertility struggles. Looking back in her memoir, You Got Anything Stronger? she says that while trying to get pregnant, she experienced numerous miscarriages before being diagnosed with adenomyosis. The condition causes the tissue lining the uterus to grow into the muscular wall of the uterus and can cause pregnancy loss. Eventually, Gabrielle’s doctor told her, “your best chance for a healthy baby would be surrogacy.”

While she initially resisted the idea, and considered a potentially dangerous drug that had a small chance of treating the condition, she says it was her husband Dwyane Wade who finally convinced her surrogacy was the right choice. She remembers him telling her, “You’ve done enough…As much as we want this baby, I want you. We’ve lost too much in our relationship for me to be okay with encouraging you to do one more thing to your body and your soul.”

Kim Kardashian carried her first two children, whom she welcomed with Kanye West, but she ended up developing a potentially life-threatening condition called placenta accreta. The condition causes the placenta to abnormally attach to the uterine wall, penetrating too deeply and can cause severe bleeding. Kim ended up having five surgeries within a year and a half to fix the internal damage it caused.

While the couple hoped the surgeries would allow Kim to have safe pregnancies in the future, it ultimately proved too dangerous for her to carry any more children. Kim and Kanye ended up using a surrogate for their two younger children.

“So I asked my doctors, can I do it one more time? And they were like, ‘We won’t even put an embryo in you, that would be like malpractice.’ And I opted to have a surrogate to use the last two embryos that we had. I am just so thankful for my beautiful kids, no matter how they came to me. I’m really thankful for surrogates,” she said in an Instagram video.

Paris Hilton chose to use a surrogate when welcoming her two children due to trauma she’s faced in her past. As a teenager, Paris attended an abusive boarding school where she allegedly faced physical, emotional and sexual abuse, which she said included nonconsensual gynecological examinations. She said she was left with “so much PTSD from what [she] went through” that even now, being in a doctor’s office can cause her to have panic attacks. She felt that it was the best choice for both herself and her children to use a surrogate.

“If I’m in a doctor’s office, I get a shot, anything, I will literally have a panic attack and I can’t breathe,” she told Romper. “I just knew that would not be healthy for me or the baby, growing inside of someone who has such high anxiety.”

In 2015, Lucy Liu chose to use a surrogate to welcome her son Rockwell. At the time, Lucy was single and didn’t know when she would have the time in her life to follow the traditional route of welcoming a child with a partner.

“It just seemed like the right option for me because I was working and I didn’t know when I was going to be able to stop. I decided that was probably the best solution for me, and it turned out to be great,” Lucy told PEOPLE.

Before Kristen Wiig and her husband Avi Rothman welcomed twins via surrogacy, she says that they struggled to conceive. They then turned to IVF and spent three years unsuccessfully attempting to get pregnant. Looking back, Kristen says it was one of the most difficult times of her life and it took her a long time to make the decision to use surrogacy.

“We’ve been together for about five years, and three of them were spent in an [in vitro fertilization] haze. Emotionally, spiritually and medically, it was probably the most difficult time in my life. I wasn’t myself…It was just bad news after bad news. There was a lot of stress and heartache,” Kristen told InStyle in 2020.

She continued, “I finally realized that I just needed help. And, thank God, we found the most amazing surrogate…I became really close with our surrogate, and it was her first time doing it so we kind of went through everything together. When the children were born, I wanted to make sure she was OK and she wanted to make sure I was OK.”

After Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick welcomed their first child, they attempted to expand their family for several years. Unfortunately, they were met with fertility issues and experienced their fair share of disappointment before deciding to use a surrogate.

“Well, you know, we’ve been trying to expand our family for a number of years and we actually have explored a variety of ways of doing so. This was one of the things we discussed with seriousness that had real possibilities for us,” she shared with Access Hollywood. “It would be odd to have made this choice if I was able to, you know, have successful pregnancies since my son’s birth.”

Giuliana Rancic and her husband Bill have been incredibly open about their journey to welcoming their son. Around the time they were trying to conceive, Giuliana was diagnosed with breast cancer and getting pregnant wouldn’t have been the best option for her. When she was declared cancer-free after treatment, doctors advised waiting three to five years before trying to conceive — and the couple decided to use a surrogate instead.

“If she’d gotten pregnant, it probably wouldn’t have been a very good outcome because of all the hormones — it would have made the cancer surge. So this was the best option,” Bill told Us Weekly.

Jimmy Fallon and his wife Nancy struggled with infertility for years before turning to surrogacy. Jimmy says the couple first “tried a bunch of things” to get pregnant naturally and it ended up being an “awful” time in their lives. Eventually, they turned to surrogacy.

“We tried for a long time, for five years. I know people have tried much longer, but if there’s anyone out there who is trying and they’re just losing hope…just hang in there,” he said on the Today show. “Try every avenue; try anything you can do, ’cause you’ll get there. You’ll end up with a family, and it’s so worth it. It is the most ‘worth it’ thing.”

For Jordana Brewster and her husband Andrew Form, they turned to surrogacy after they had trouble conceiving on their own. Looking back, Jordana says she thought it was going to be an easy journey to conceive and eventually realized she would have to look at other options.

“I thought [conceiving] would be no problem for me, which I think a lot of women do,” she told PEOPLE. “I feel like we sort of assume, ‘Oh, okay, I’m on the track, I’ve been married and now I want to have a kid, and it shouldn’t be a big problem.’ And then all of a sudden you realize, ‘Wait, this is going to be a little more challenging than I thought.’”

She added, “I think [other moms] assumed that I didn’t want to carry, or I didn’t want to go through that experience. I think there’s just an inherent judgment with surrogacy.”

When Elizabeth Banks and her husband, Max Handelman, welcomed their first child, she shared that he had been born via surrogate. Elizabeth explained that after years of trying to conceive on their own, the couple decided to turn to surrogacy for a healthy and safe pregnancy.

“The one true hurdle I’ve faced in life is that I have a broken belly. After years of trying to get pregnant, exploring the range of fertility treatments, all unsuccessful, our journey led us to gestational surrogacy: We make a ‘baby cake’ and bake it in another woman’s ‘oven,’” Elizabeth shared on her blog.

Angela Bassett and her husband Courtney Vance went through seven years of failed fertility treatments, including IVF, before a friend told them about surrogacy. The friend had announced that she was expecting a baby but didn’t look pregnant, so Angela asked her about her journey. That’s when she began learning about surrogacy.

“I was devastated when it didn’t happen [again and again],” Angela said on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007. “The more we learned about [surrogacy], the more we began to think that perhaps this was an answer for us.”