Actress and writer Lena Dunham has announced the birth of her first child, an event she and husband Luis Felber shared this week in a Vogue op-ed. The couple married in 2021.
Dunham did not carry the baby herself. She underwent a hysterectomy in 2018 due to endometriosis, and the couple worked with a surrogate to have their child.
Writing about the experience, Dunham described the moment she met her surrogate before the birth: “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 also wrote about waiting for the delivery: “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.”
Once the baby arrived, Dunham described her first words to the newborn: “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.”
Speaking to People in April, Dunham said motherhood had long been part of how she saw herself. “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,” she said.
A decade-old comment about Texas
The news has drawn attention to remarks Dunham made a decade ago, in 2016, on an episode of her podcast titled “Choice.” In it, she recalled an encounter at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas.
“I always thought that I myself didn’t stigmatize abortion,” Dunham said on the podcast. “I’m an abortion rights activist, it’s a huge part of who I am.”
She went on to describe the Texas visit: “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.”
Dunham said the moment made her reflect on her own views. “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.”
She added that people close to her had had abortions. “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.”
She closed the segment with a line that has resurfaced widely since her pregnancy announcement: “Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.”
Dunham has not publicly addressed how those 2016 remarks square with becoming a mother for the first time nearly a decade later.
