Actress and writer Lena Dunham has welcomed her first child, nearly a decade after a podcast remark in which she said she wished she had had an abortion herself.
Ms. Dunham, 40, and her husband, Luis Felber, announced the birth of a daughter this week in a personal essay for Vogue, writing that “in the face of a solar eclipse and a meteor shower, she announced herself.” The couple used a surrogate; Ms. Dunham had a hysterectomy in 2017 following a long battle with endometriosis.
Ms. Dunham has said publicly that motherhood was always part of her plans. In an April interview on NBC’s “Today,” she told hosts Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones, “Some people don’t dream about being mothers, but I had.”
Her remarks this week arrive nearly a decade after a very different comment. On a December 2016 episode of her podcast “Women of the Hour” titled “Choice,” she recounted being asked to share an abortion story at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas and realizing she had internalized stigma by insisting she’d never had one herself. Of the women in her life who had, she said, she was proud, saying: “I feel so proud of them for their bravery, for their self-knowledge.”
She went further, saying she wished she had had the experience herself. The remark drew swift backlash, and Ms. Dunham apologized on Instagram, calling it a “distasteful joke” delivered from what she described as a “delusional girl” persona.
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