The moment I saw Lily Collins cradling her newborn daughter on Instagram, I recognized it. She was, as she put it in the caption, in “mom mode.” Unbrushed hair and slightly grubby sweatshirt? Messy bedroom? The pallid skin of someone who’s just been handed a tiny baby and realized it’s all down to them? Three months into my own motherhood journey, I can safely say: tick, tick, and tick.
The difference is that the 35-year-old Emily in Paris actor and her husband, film director Charlie McDowell, used a surrogate in order to have their daughter, Tove.
And if becoming a new parent stirs in people, including total strangers, a sudden urge to judge your every move (shout out to the woman on the bus who recently told my pal off for taking her newborn out of the house), try announcing on social media that you’ve dared to have a baby with the help of a third party.
Since the couple shared their happy news on Instagram, there’s been a wild amount of speculation about why they needed a surrogate in the first place. “Rich people using women as incubators” and “The Handmaid’s Tale: celebrity version” read two of the many comments underneath Collins’s post. Funny, I don’t remember seeing the new baby greetings cards for those sentiments.
As always when we don’t have all the information about a particular celebrity’s life choices, people rush to fill the vacuum with their own assumptions. Collins must have used a surrogate because she’s too vain/lazy/rich to bother going through pregnancy herself, right? Far easier to outsource it. This sort of practice even has a name, “social surrogacy,” as if you’ve just popped down to the local dry cleaners and asked the woman behind the counter if she wouldn’t mind carrying your child, as well as laundering your party frock.
We fall into this trap every time a woman in the public eye has a baby in this way (see also: Sarah Jessica Parker, Nicole Kidman, and Kim Kardashian), a trap that sees us call them out in the name of feminism—so unsisterly to use another woman’s body to carry your baby—but hinges on the idea that her own appearance is all that matters. That’s ingrained misogyny at its finest and most hypocritical.
