The Lily Collins Baby Backlash and My Parenting Firmware Update

It was 6:14 AM on a rainy Tuesday in Portland, and I was staring at a lukewarm cup of coffee while my 11-month-old son aggressively tried to pull my beard out from the roots. I had managed to wrestle him into his carrier after a night of sleep regression that felt like a localized denial-of-service attack on my sanity, and I made the fatal mistake of opening my phone to look at the news. Right at the top of my feed was the announcement that actress Lily Collins and her husband Charlie McDowell had welcomed their first daughter, Tove Jane, via gestational surrogacy.

I thought it was a nice story. A new family, a healthy kid. But then I scrolled down to the comments, and my brain essentially blue-screened. The sheer volume of people demanding to know why she didn’t carry the pregnancy herself, questioning her "real" motherhood, and aggressively auditing a stranger's reproductive choices was staggering. It made me realize how completely broken our collective understanding of family building actually is, and it forced me to look back at my own clueless assumptions from before my wife and I had our son.

The internet is terrible at reproductive data

Before becoming a dad, my understanding of how babies were made was roughly on par with a high school health class video from 1998. I kind of assumed everyone just decided to have a kid, and nine months later, a baby appeared. I had no idea about the grueling, heartbreaking, incredibly common medical hurdles people face. My wife, who's infinitely smarter than I'm, had to gently explain to me that fertility is basically a chaotic roll of the genetic dice.

Collins had previously written a memoir where she was incredibly open about her past struggles with a severe eating disorder, noting that it had temporarily stopped her menstrual cycle and left her with deep anxiety about her future fertility. Apparently, severe trauma to the body can hard-crash your reproductive system, and yet thousands of strangers felt entitled to log onto the internet and demand her personal medical history. People were throwing around terms like "vanity surrogacy" as if they had somehow accessed her medical files.

When my wife and I were looking into the actual data—because I process anxiety by reading spreadsheets—I found out that embryo transfer cycles using a gestational carrier hit over 8,800 in 2021, according to the CDC. That’s nearly triple what it was a decade ago. People don't pursue a process that can cost upward of $170,000 in the U.S. just because they want to avoid stretch marks. They do it because of severe uterine damage, chronic health conditions requiring unsafe medications, or biological barriers that make carrying a pregnancy impossible.

Pregnancy is just the installation phase

Here's the biggest paradigm shift I’ve had over the last eleven months: I used to think the nine months of pregnancy were the main event, but it turns out gestation is just the installation phase. The real, soul-crushing, heart-expanding work happens when the baby actually arrives and you've to figure out how to keep this tiny, yelling potato alive.

One of the criticisms I saw hurled at parents who use surrogates is this bizarre idea that they won't bond with the baby because they didn't physically give birth. Our doctor told us during our first frantic week home that babies build secure attachments through responsive care—meaning that whoever is doing the feeding, the 3 AM soothing, and the endless rocking is the one the baby wires their nervous system to. It has absolutely nothing to do with who pushed them out of a birth canal.

If you're welcoming a baby via surrogate, your fourth trimester is going to be just as much of a trial by fire as anyone else's. You still need to do massive amounts of skin-to-skin contact, which my wife and I relied on heavily when our son wouldn't stop screaming between the hours of 7 and 10 PM. We basically lived with our shirts off for a month. When we did dress him, we heavily relied on the Kianao Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. Honestly, this is one of my favorite things we own because after a synthetic onesie gave my kid a weird, red, rashy patch that sent me into a midnight Google panic spiral, this organic cotton one actually let his skin breathe. Plus, the neck is stretchy enough that I don't feel like I'm breaking his collarbone every time I try to dress him while he's thrashing around like a tiny alligator.

Financial privilege and the messy math of family building

We do need to talk about the financial aspect, though, because ignoring it feels disingenuous. Surrogacy in the United States is overwhelmingly a pathway only available to the wealthy. Between the IVF treatments, the medical bills for the surrogate, the agency fees, and the legal contracts, you're looking at the price of a small house. It’s a massive privilege to be able to bypass biological roadblocks with a checkbook.

But the narrative that surrogates are financially desperate women being exploited by wealthy celebrities is apparently largely a myth in heavily regulated markets like the U.S. I fell down a rabbit hole reading a study from a journal called Reproductive BioMedicine, which stated that gestational carriers typically have medium-to-high education levels and above-average incomes. They're mostly driven by empathy and a desire to help someone else build a family, not by a desperate need to pay rent. The idea that these women lack the agency to make decisions about their own bodies is just another weird way society tries to police women.

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Your nesting instinct doesn't need a bump

When we were getting ready for our son, my wife had the physical reminder of a growing bump to trigger her nesting instincts. For intended parents using a surrogate, the preparation phase looks different, but the anxiety is exactly the same. You still find yourself awake at 2 AM researching the exact toxicity levels of various plastic toys and wondering if a slightly sharp edge on a baseboard is going to send your future child to the emergency room.

Without the physical limitations of late-stage pregnancy, intended parents often channel all that nervous energy into curating the environment. I remember hyper-focusing on our nursery setup as a way to feel like I was contributing. Setting up the Wooden Rainbow Play Gym was one of the few nesting tasks I successfully completed without my wife having to come in behind me and fix it. I genuinely really like this thing because it’s made of natural wood and doesn't play aggressive, flashing electronic music that makes me want to throw it out a window. It just sits there looking nice while the baby bats at the little elephant.

On the flip side, we also have the Panda Silicone Baby Teether, which is... fine. It's totally safe and non-toxic, and it's supposed to massage the gums, but if I'm being completely honest, my son heavily prefers trying to chew on my laptop charger or the television remote. We keep the panda in the diaper bag as a backup for restaurants, but it usually just ends up dropped on the floor.

Boundaries are a required security patch

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching the absolute meltdown over a celebrity baby announcement, it’s that people feel wildly entitled to your family’s operational data. When you've a baby, suddenly your mother-in-law, your neighbor, and the guy making your coffee think they've admin rights to your parenting choices.

If you're an intended parent who used a surrogate, the questions you get are probably going to be highly invasive. People will ask about the surrogate’s biology, how much it cost, or why you didn’t just adopt—as if the grow care system is an Amazon Prime delivery service for human beings. Instead of letting nosy relatives run diagnostics on your family planning while you’re running on zero sleep, try politely shutting down the conversation with a generic statement about being grateful for your medical team while aggressively passing them the baby so you can go eat a handful of dry cereal in the kitchen.

honestly, getting the baby into your house is just step one. However you managed to compile your family—whether it involved IVF, a gestational carrier, adoption, or a standard-issue biological pregnancy—the moment that kid is in your arms, you're officially in the thick of it. You're going to get pooped on, you're going to cry in the shower, and you're going to fall so deeply in love with a screaming little alien that it physically hurts.

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Messy Dad FAQs

Do babies born via surrogate have trouble bonding?

From everything my doctor has said, absolutely not. Babies don't care whose uterus they were in; they care who's holding them right now. If you're doing the skin-to-skin contact, feeding them, and responding when they cry, their little brains are going to wire themselves directly to you. Bonding is a verb, it's something you do through a thousand exhausting, repetitive actions every single day.

How do I deal with people asking why we didn't just adopt?

This question drives me insane because it treats adoption like it's a simple, trauma-free paperwork exercise instead of a highly complex, emotionally taxing process. When people ask this, I've found it's best to just give them a blank stare and say, "We made the medical and family choices that were right for us, but anyway, did you see the baby just learned how to blow raspberries?" Pivot and deflect. You don't owe anyone your medical reasoning.

Is it normal to feel completely disconnected when the baby first arrives?

Oh man, yes. I spent the first two weeks of my son's life wondering if I had made a terrible mistake because I just felt tired and terrified, not magically blissful. Whether you carry the baby or a surrogate does, that instant movie-magic bond is often a myth. It took me a few months of staring at him at 4 AM to really feel that overwhelming connection. Give yourself a minute to adjust to the firmware update; your whole life just changed.

What's the best way to do skin-to-skin if we didn't give birth?

Just take your shirt off and lay the baby on your chest. Seriously, it's that simple. We used to do it while watching terrible reality TV. Throw a soft blanket over their back so they don't get cold, and just let them sleep on you. Apparently, your body temperature will naturally adjust to warm them up, which is probably the coolest biological feature humans have. Just make sure you pee before you sit down, because you'll be trapped there for at least an hour.