Elizabeth Banks Says That Her Surrogate Is ‘Like An Auntie’
Elizabeth Banks, star of Hunger Games and soon to take to the screen in What To Expect When You’re Expecting, makes no pretense about choosing surrogacy in her route to motherhood. The mother of one recently opened up about she and husband Max Handelman‘s decision to go surrogate when building their family — and she calls the woman who carried her son “extraordinary.”
Banks tells Lucky magazine that embryos failed to implant in her womb, and so she and her husband ultimately chose to make “a big leap”:
”It’s a big leap, inviting this person into your life to do this amazing, important thing for you. And it’s hard losing that kind of control. But our surrogate is so extraordinary, and she’s still in our lives. She’s like an auntie.”
Banks’ son Felix is now almost one year old and she tells the publication that she “hates being away from him for even 10 seconds.” But her openness about her own surrogacy experience serves to dispel surrogacy stigmas for women who for whatever reason cannot, or choose not, to carry children. Women who seek the aide of surrogates in motherhood shouldn’t feel marginalized for bypassing pregnancy given the many options now available in achieving family. Nevertheless, a hierarchy of “true motherhood” remains in place with some women feeling embarrassed or ashamed for considering such a nontraditional avenue.
Banks’ reasons may have been medical, but her story brings light to a corner of contemporary motherhood that often gets dismissed.
(photo: WENN)
