Lena Dunham has opened up about her struggle to have biological kids.
The “Girls” creator recounts in a new essay her failed attempt to have a child through in vitro fertilization and surrogacy — which she turned to after having her uterus, cervix, and one of her ovaries removed because of endometriosis and other chronic health problems.
“It turned out that after everything I’d been through—the chemical menopause, surgeries by the dozen, the carelessness of drug addiction—my one remaining ovary was still producing eggs,” she wrote in the piece, which is running the December 2020 issue of Harper’s magazine.
“If we successfully harvested them, they might be fertilized with donor sperm and carried to term by a surrogate.”
The actress, who had gone to rehab after becoming addicted to opioids following her hysterectomy, finally had hope that she would be able to welcome her own child into the world, only to be disappointed again.
“I learned that none of my eggs were viable on Memorial Day, in the midst of a global pandemic,” she wrote. “When [the doctor] spoke my name with that sympathetic downturn, the apologetic-doctor voice I have come to know so well, my face crumpled in apprehension.”
The doctor told Dunham that five of the six of her eggs were unable to be fertilized and the sixth had chromosomal issues, meaning that all eggs had failed to fertilize.
“I was wiping my eyes and thanking him again and again,” she wrote. “In my head, I was already telling my parents. The only comfort for this failure of biology was biology, the inherent understanding of the people who made me.”
The 34-year-old actress said she always dreamed of having children, but her body would never allow it.
“When I was a little girl…I had already made every egg I was ever going to have,” she wrote. “They were inside me, destined to fail. I just didn’t know it yet. I was another cocky woman-to-be, sure that I would have what I wanted because I wanted it. Because I had always gotten it. Because the world told me it was mine to take.”
She continued, “I tried to have a child. Along the way, my body broke. My relationship did, too. In the process—because of it?—I became a functional junkie. I had lost my way, and a half-dozen eggs sitting in Midtown promised to lead me home.”
The star said that the process pulled her further away from her friends, her relationships, her family, herself and her reality.
“Each move was more expensive, more desperate, more lonely,” she wrote. “I stopped being able to picture the ending.”
Dunham explained that after all the trying and all the pain, she still longs to be a mother.
“There is a lot you can correct in life—you can end a relationship, get sober, get serious, say sorry—but you can’t force the universe to give you a baby that your body has told you all along was an impossibility,” she wrote. “Weak animals die in the woods as their pack mates run ahead. Bad eggs don’t hatch. You can’t bend nature.