During what should have been one of the happiest moments of her life, actress Gabrielle Union took plenty of heat from the internet when she and husband Dwyane Wade announced the birth of their daughter Kaavia via surrogate in 2018.
“Why are you in a hospital gown exhausted if you didn’t give birth?? That’s so wrong!” was just one of the critical comments left on her November 8 Instagram post.
But Union has managed to tune out the haters and dive into motherhood head first, as mom to Kaavia and stepmom to Zaire, 23, Dahveon, 21, Zaya, 17, and Xavier, 11. Now, in a May 7 interview with Marie Claire, Union is opening up about the decision she and Wade made to use a surrogate to grow their family. She also addressed how she managed both her internal guilt and the public criticism that came along with accepting that her body wouldn’t allow her to give birth naturally.
After suffering through years of unsuccessful In vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments and several miscarriages, Union told Marie Claire that watching someone else do something she couldn’t was painful.
“It felt like failure. My body failed. It just felt like such a f*****g public humiliation,” she said. “Surrogacy felt like a cuckold; watching somebody do something I can’t do. To be there for somebody else succeeding where I failed—it is a mind f**k for people who have had my journey and who feel similarly. When it’s never been your reality, I get the urge to judge and cast aspersions because we all want whatever route we took to be the ‘right’ way.”
Union says that although some have criticized her decision to enlist the help of a surrogate, no one has had the courage to do it to her face. She declared how she made the conscious choice to give zero f***s about what anyone has to say.
“These are phantom punches. They’re not landing when you’ve been in therapy as long as I have. You recognize hurt people try to hurt people. You tried it, but it doesn’t land.” she added.
But while Union says she’s “very grateful” to their gestational carrier for bringing Kaavia into the world, she adds that she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to make peace with the idea that she wasn’t able to carry a child herself.
“That’s not a what-anybody-has-to-say thing; that’s just—my yearning has never dissipated,” she said.