Lena Dunham announces birth of first baby with husband Luis Felber via surrogacy
The creator of hit TV series girls announced the birth of her baby daughter via surrogacy.
Leading screenwriter and actress Lena Dunham and husband Luis Felber have revealed the birth of their first child via surrogate.
Dunham, who burst on to the entertainment scene with hit HBO series Girls, broke the news in Vogue with a column in which she revealed the arrival of her daughter left her “bashful and dizzy with joy”.
It followed the 40-year-old’s well-documented health issues, particularly with regards to fertility as a result of undergoing a hysterectomy at age 31 in the wake of a 12-year struggle with endometriosis.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.In the op-ed piece she addressed the quirky nature of her first encounter with her surrogate: “While I’ve been known to make friends quickly - airport terminals, veterinary offices - this was the quickest leap from first coffee to gynecological procedure I’d ever done.”
It also covered her first meeting with her daughter, who was born 13 days after her due date, as she “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.”
“I forgot to look down until I heard our baby’s cry. I saw her face, gasping just as she did. Her eyes, wide and unfocused, taking in the light and shadow, blinking rapidly.”
The birth caps off Dunham’s lengthy struggle with endometriosis and it’s devastating effect on her dreams of motherhood.
In her recent memoir Famesick, she detailed how she “started searching for a baby” immediately after undergoing her hysterectomy in 2018.
That involved searching for a surrogate and undergoing the process of egg extraction during the pandemic.
She said the combination of the two tasks during the restrictions of COVID-19 left her “one day obsessed with adoption and another, dying to locate a surrogate - one day sure I’d be fine if I never had children, and the next convinced my life had been a waste”.
She also documented the arduous process of waiting to hear if the process had worked along with the fact that she would not be experiencing the “physical changes of a growing uterus” herself.
“My husband was better at the waiting, but he hadn’t spent the last 12 years circling the fertility drain, and he offered as many hopeful assurances as he could without making false promises,” she wrote.
Dunham, who created Netflix series Too Much with husband Felber in 2025, hinted to US media that year that the couple were “in the process of expanding our family in new ways”, but did not mention the surrogacy process.
“I want to safely meet our children and then figure out how to talk about it,” she told The Times in the UK in 2025.
While details are scarce, it has been confirmed that the couple were in the US for the birth but are planning to return to their home in London when it is safe to do so.
