I believe in reproductive freedom, or as Hillary Thomas would say, libertad reproductiva. Every woman has the right to use or not use whatever birth control she wants. Every woman has the right to a timely and safe abortion. Every woman has the right to seek whatever fertility treatments she wants. Now, all that being said, when it comes to surrogacy and gestational carriers, I do believe that women should be free to seek those arrangements (on both sides), but the ethics are trickier because of horrendous exploitation issues, and at times the surrogacy and carrier issues can feel like the Wild West of the medical field. Which brings me to Hillary Baldwin, or “Hilaria.” Hilaria clearly decided to implant fertilized eggs into a gestational carrier (or surrogate) while she (Hilaria) was pregnant with Eduardo last year. The timeline of it is completely sketchy, and it is now widely believed that Hilaria pursued the surrogacy as soon as she learned that she was pregnant with another boy, and not with the longed-for niña. Now suddenly, Hillary wants people to get out of her uterus. Then stop showing us your uterus, chica!!
Hilaria Baldwin doesn’t need to explain why she decided to expand her family the way she did, a source contends.
She and her husband Alec Baldwin surprised fans earlier this month when they announced the addition of a newborn daughter to their family, just months after Hilaria gave birth to son Eduardo “Edu” Pao Lucas in September 2020. The internet quickly went abuzz with questions about why the pair opted for surrogacy and why they did so given Hilaria would have already been pregnant with Edu at the time.
However, a source tells PEOPLE, “It’s no one’s business about a woman’s right to choose how and when she expands her family.”
Hilaria, 37, and Alec, 62, share sons Edu, Romeo Alejandro David, 2½, Leonardo Ángel Charles, 4, and Rafael Thomas, 5½, daughter Carmen Gabriela, 7, and now newborn María Lucía Victoria. (Alec is also dad to 25-year-old daughter Ireland.)
Another source recently told PEOPLE that the mom and dad are “so happy and spending time bonding together as a family,” adding that “Lucía’s big brothers and sister are all excited to have a new sibling.”
“It’s no one’s business about a woman’s right to choose how and when she expands her family.” Again, reproductive choice es muy bueno. But this is, how you say, an ethical quagmire. I find it very hard to believe that professional doctors in good standing of the New York medical board signed off on all of this, knowing that Hillary was pregnant at the time and knowing that she (apparently) gender-selected an embryo so she could get “la nina,” implanted into a surrogate. It’s fine to tell people to get out of your uterus except A) when you’ve built your career on your incessant oversharing, and B) in the case when it’s not HER f–king uterus. It was a uterus for hire! We have every right, as a society, to discuss these kinds of profoundly unethical and possibly exploitative issues. Este es un caso para el FBI!!
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Instagram, WENN.
Lo siento, no hablo inglesa.
Hahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!
Maybe that’s why she wants people to stop asking because something unethical/shady will be discovered about the abnormal approval they got here? I thought surrogacy was just recently legalized in new york?
Also she doesn’t want the focus off her for one second as she sells the entire process of her path to motherhood for each child lingerie pics and all
I agree—She definitely wants people to stop talking about this because something shady went down. This whole thing is so weird. I don’t understand why she told an interviewer in November, after she had given birth to “Edu”, that she & Alec we’re done having kids! Obviously the surrogate was pregnant at that time, so Hilary knew they weren’t “done” having kids! It just makes this whole situation weirder IMO.
I saw a blind on DeuxMoi about a celeb having an affair and his wife planning to introduce the baby as their own. It was A WHILE back so I might be off base, lo siento. I can’t imagine an already pregnant person going, ‘oh why not add another child however many months after I give birth?’ even if said super heroina was a bilingual attention seeker with abs of hierro. It makes poco sense.
Nahh-this one looks like a carbon copy of all of their other kids. I think it was their embryo implanted in a gestational carrier to guarantee she got a girl, and to not wait anymore time since the baby and Carmen are already 7 years apart. (And she’s made a huge thing over the years about wanting to give Carmen a sister.) Dios Mio.
@MaryContrary You know, I always want to think she’s not as loca and ahem… irresponsible, but she really does exceed my expectations. I need to suspend disbelief when it comes to the Baldwinitos. I did a quick google search and Dios mio indeed, they have 5 nannies so I guess another infant won’t get in the way of Hillary’s (vinyasa) flow.
You married a man who comes from a family of Brothers. Odds are pretty good that you’re going to have a lot of boys. IJS.
That’s not how that works. there’s a 50/50 chance of getting a male or female with every pregnancy, regardless of family history, anecdotes, etc.
Actually, this one is not necessarily true. My husband’s family has an x linked chromosomal defect that means that most (not all) of their X chromosome sperm will not fertilize, and half of the few that fertilize an egg will result in a miscarriage. My sister-in-law went through IVF to get my niece, and they had 18 embryos, 6 female, only one chromosomally female viable that made it to blast. We always knew there was something off with the female line (no females born to the family going back 5 generations) but her IVF and genetic testing finally gave the solution. It’s possible Alec has a similar issue and Ireland was just pure chance the way my daughter was.
Alec also has two sisters. So 4 boys, 2 girls.
And that is exactly the makeup of Alec’s children before they got a surrogate involved.
We were Hillary. But you kept talking about it to us while our faces were down in out drinks and you still didn’t get the hint.
Uh, isn’t most of her over sharing uterus related? Like that’s a huge part of her “business model.” Her uterus and the Irish American babies that come from there. This probably isn’t good for whatever business she’s in.
With the wealth gap widening & A PANDEMIC—is it so ethically y’all- to RENT A WOMB just because you wanted a girl, not a full term boy, to complete your doll menagerie of SIX HEALTHY CHILDREN???
Are rich women going to rent their wombs, or it this just an health risk for the financially desperate?
While I enjoy the Spanglish lol, I thought you might want to know when you said “The timeline of it is completely sketchy, and it is now widely believed that Hilaria pursued the surrogacy as soon as she learned that she was pregnant with another boy, and not with the longed-for niñera.” Niñera actually means babysitter/nanny in Spanish, not baby girl, which was unintentionally funny for me thinking of Hilaria waiting to give birth to her own babysitter.
As if she’s a Duggar
🤣🤣
I’m all for staying out of her uterus, but óyeme Hillary vamos a hablar de tu ser española.
Dios mio, stop going on social media and inviting everyone in to your uterus. Done.
exactamundo! first she posts an inane amount of information about herself and then mudslings everyone who “judges” her. What did she expect exactly?
Her social media efforts inviting everyone into her uterus remind me of this Patsy line from Ab Fab
“One snap of my fingers and I can raise hemlines so high the world’s your gynecologist!”
I have a possible shocking suggestion. Keep your private sh*t off social media. It’s laughable when people (regular folks or not) make public statements or share photos of their children and homes, then ask for privacy. I am so glad my messy 20s were in the 90s… no photos exist! The constant reaching to stay relevant… it must be exhausting. If people share their personal issues on a platform with a comments section, best of luck!
or just living your life thinking “oh this would make a good post” and staging the entire thing for people to obsess over. They desperately want attention and are so thin skinned when they actually get it.
God is good. No purple pubes + no 90’s social media = stable family life &adulthood
Totally agree. You can’t have it both ways.
As someone who was fortunate to have access to fertility treatments, I take reproductive choice very seriously – I had the choice to seek medical intervention to create, I can’t imagine any just world that would not allow medical intervention to stop or terminate if that what someone felt was best for them. However….just because life CAN be created doesn’t seem like it should under any and all circumstances. Situations like this, or having 20 kids, or having 8 eggs implanted (i.e, octomom) it feels like at some point there is an ethical concern. I remember a client I had years ago had 5 children, all in foster care, and she had a pretty serious cognitive impairment…I can’t reconcile that. But I wish there were more conversations about this other than my choice, my body….like, is it your choice? Do you have the capacity to understand? If you cannot support your children to some standard, is it ethical to keep having more? But of course, there’s a larger debate about access to healthcare, access to mental health, housing, fair livable wages….I don’t know what the answer is, and I can see the slippy slope to all sorts of horrible eugenics like policies, but surely there is a conversation to be had?
I totally agree with you. But that is one, complicated, messy conversation-with a million shades of grey that no one wants to take on.
I agree that we as a society need to open up our conversations about fertility. We celebrate pregnancy and children, without question.
Sunnydaze- your mention of the woman with five children and cognitive difficulties is a great example. I have no idea of her circumstances but hearing that she had five children is concerning for so many reasons: did she get pregnant by choice? Did she understand the ramifications of bringing each of those children into the world? At what point should society step in and intervene for the sake of future children who will end up in foster care? And how do we do that without ending up in Nazi eugenics territory? I have no clue but I think the first step is acknowledging that there is real trauma happening.
There are seven billion people in the world. We are now dealing with the effects of global warming and that will only get worse from here. Resources are limited. I am tired of privileged (usually white) women like Hilariot abusing fertility treatments like this. Hilaria is clearly a narcissist and her actions will seriously affect her last two children. And her narcissism will affect all six.
To be clear, this is not a knock against people using fertility treatments when they… don’t already have five children. Nor is it a knock to women who have many children due to cultural norms, lack of access to birth control or sexual coercion/rape. That is a different conversation.
How about you get out of the news, EEEEElaria.
Hillary’s the ambivalent seductress of Instagram.
Every women I’ve ever met who used surrogacy did so because they struggled with infertility or issues that made carrying their own pregnancies risky. It was certainly not their first choice. I think the issue here is that this woman took a process that was created to help address that and turned it into a rich women’s fancy to get the daughter she was so clearly desperate for.
I also really hate this thing she does where she lays the demand for a daughter on her oldest, Carmen. “Oh, Carmen wants a sister so badly!” BS. A child does not “need” a sibling of their own sex. Maybe I am tender on this point because I have that – my son has 4 sisters. He does not have a brother, but that does not stop people some suggesting that we “need” to keep going, because what will the poor boy do with himself? Uh…enjoy having sisters? People, I have 5 kids, I don’t need another, of any sex or gender! Carmen was going to be fine with brothers – its her mother who feeds into the belief that she “needed” a girl.
Also, Carmen has a sister. It’s just an older sister rather than a younger one.
I still don’t understand why she didn’t just implant a girl embryo into herself via IVF. I assume Lucia is biologically theirs (based on looks and their own self-obsession), so she had to go through egg retrieval at some point. That’s usually the most invasive, expensive, and uncomfortable part. Once you’ve gone that far, why not just put a girl one back in yourself until it sticks?
I tend to believe that Edu was an unplanned pregnancy, and that she always planned to use a surrogate for Lucia. Even if she had planned to have the embryo implanted in herself, the timeline doesn’t make sense – have your eggs harvested, have one fertilized, confirm its a girl, etc. Okay, after all that, she finds out she’s pregnant with Edu – still, why not give birth to him, wait for the all clear, then get implanted with Lucia’s embryo and do it that way? My guess is that they had likely already sank money into the surrogacy process – paying a retainer or something along those lines, etc., and Alec probably took the view that he was already paying for it, so no backing out now. I do get that after 5 pregnancies, maybe it was starting to wear on her, but still, it does confuse me.
@Sam the Pink- You might be right. Alec has NBC syndication money, so I don’t think it’s a finance thing.
I suspect she genuinely thought it would mostly fly under the radar since, at the time, she was just a celeb wife with a little podcast. She wasn’t this level of famous until the fake accent scandal. Once that broke over the holidays, the gestational carrier was already in her third trimester with this surrogacy pregnancy.
Off topic, bit I love the fact that you said “sex or gender”. Not everyone gets that distinction, and It’s awesome for your kids that you are so knowledgeable and sensitive.
Then 👏 stop 👏 talking 👏 about 👏 it! PENDEJA!!!
X100!
LOL!!!!
Looking at all those kids gives me heart palpitations. My two little crazies seem downright relaxing compared to all of those ninos. Ay caramba!
So she thinks she can resume normal service?
Back to talking about her thirty Spanish named kids and doing weird yoga in her kitchen?
The whole worlds gonna forget you pretended to be a Spanish person huh?
You want people to stay out of your over active uterus, stop posting the results of it twice a day on social media.
^Weird yoga in your kitchen in your lingerie.
Then stop showing us what comes out of your uterus (or the one you hired)
I wonder if AB wishes he had never got into her uterus
Reproductive choice is fundamentally about having bodily autonomy and the right to human dignity. Of course there’s a feminist aspect to having reproductive options but conflating the two is a mistake, IMO. There’s zero ethical complexity to ensuring a terrified16 year old has safe, legal, shame free choices. Which is a different matter than a financially secure adult woman exploring a variety of fertility options. They’re two completely different issues and neither benefits from being grouped together.
Thank you for articulating what I tried above!
“Reproductive choice” also does not mean we cannot debate or probe into the ethical, moral and social implications of any particular choice. It’s like debating over whether abortions on the basis of disability play into ableism and discrimination/devaluing of disabled lives – the legality of the action and the morality of the action are different things. Or the debate over sex selection abortion, surrogacy debates, etc.
She lost me when she filmed telling Carmen that she’d miscarried “her sister” and posted it on IG. That was beyond the pale.
She’s used Carmen as the primary recipient/vessel/target of SO many of her twisted insane ploys for attention, I feel so sad and scared for that girl.
While I agree with the general sentiment regarding family planning and privacy and all…she’s only saying this because this time the feedback was not so glowing.
It’s obvious what they did, surrogacy for a girl when they found out she was pregnant with a boy. If they had truly kept their family planning private, no one would have known or likely cared. But when you build your whole persona on having babies, and then do THIS…people are going to ask.
My guess is she was planning to to implant the female embryo but got pregnant (it takes a few weeks after the egg retrieval to figure out the gender…you have to wait until your next cycle). So she decided to get a gestational carrier.
I don’t see how what she did was unethical. She wanted a girl, they have the money to afford having a doctor help select a healthy embryo to implant into surrogate. They have the financial means to raise the children. Sure, it’s a bit weird that she did this especially after having so many children already on her own but it’s not “unethical”.
What bothers me about it is they did it while she was already several months pregnant, rather than wait until that baby was born and they were ready for another.
“They have the money to afford it” doesn’t magically make an action ethical.
Surrogacy is already a complicated field (to say the least). The surrogates are paid amazingly little and it’s wearing on the body and they’re typically lower-socioeconomic status women. Do you see the issues that could come up here when a super rich woman hires a poor woman and pays her little, to literally carry a child to which she will have no legal right despite literally bearing it in her body?
And that’s just one issue with this liar person “Hilaria” who’s already been exposed publicly as a liar and tried to deny it. Lying is unethical.
That’s why here in Australia there are states where it’s illegal to pay surrogates or even use surrogates. Unfortunately it’s created an even more gross situation where wealthier couples take part in surrogacy tourism in countries like Thailand.
So, assuming she used IVF to get pregnant with # 4 and froze those embryos for #5 and had them implanted in the surrogate, this is just a lot of unpack. You just don’t “find” a surrogate and do IVF at the drop of the hat—this was in the works and planned. Maybe she was freaking out after her miscarriage and wanted to cover all the bases, but even that is just weird for lack of a better word. There’s a LOT going on here and Hillary should expect people to talk about it. Which is what she wants, most likely.
And yes, any doctor involved in these shenanigans is a quack and should be exposed as such.
While every woman should have the right to pursue whatever kinds of family planning they want, only privileged, wealthy women are usually able to afford surrogates/gestational carriers and to some degree IVF and other fertility treatments. Also having this many children would be very difficult for most non wealthy women to provide for so her choices are very different realities than what most of us actually have access to. Think about how harshly women with multiple young children are judged for being on welfare while she is praised as a super mom while she also has a team of nannies and housekeepers. Part of my issue with this whole story is that most of us women do not have anywhere close to those options when it comes to having a family and when you’re so wealthy you have these options, it’s just seems weird to me that they clearly wanted a boy and put a girl in a carrier to get a girl. It’s not normal and it’s not an option she would have except for her privilege and who she married. It’s an unsettling situation in my opinion and I have mixed feelings.
I think it’s excessively strange that she (seems to, based on things she’s said and coverage of this particular circumstance) focus on the gender of her children SO MUCH!! I know most people think about it, and many have a preference for one or the other depending on the specifics of their situation, but she seemed OBSESSED with having another girl to the extent that she now has babies less than 6 months apart, and the whole thing is NOT HEALTHY. Her youngest son is going to figure out that he wasn’t what they wanted at some point, and that is so sad. I’ve said this on here before; I wanted a healthy baby both times I was pregnant. People would ask (before we knew both times) “what do you want?” and I would say, “healthy and happy” or “we are hoping it’s a baby!” depending on how snarky I felt. We had a boy first, and when I was pregnant with our second and people would find out it was a girl, they’d say “now you’re all set!” My answer was always “I don’t care if this had been twin boys, I was done either way!” I meant it. The obsessive focus on a GIRL is strange and unsettling, and putting it on her very young daughter (“Carmen wants a sister!”) is just…no.
That’s my thing with her – if she was just a woman who loved kids and wanted a big family, I mean, fine. I know we can debate the ethics of big families, but that’s a different issue. But with her, it seemed like she was fixated on having a daughter (never mind, as has been pointed out above, that Alec already had another daughter, but okay). I do not like how she puts it all on her oldest either – “Oh, Carmen wants a sister!” Carmen is what, 7? 8? You let a child dictate your reproductive decisions? Carmen will be just fine whatever the makeup of her siblings are – don’t put this on her!
I have 1 boy and 4 girls, and some of the comments definitely cross a line. My husband was asked whether he worried that our son would be “sissy” because he has no brothers to play with! Firstly, our kids roughhouse plenty – no gender has a monopoly on that. Secondly, I don’t care if he is “sissy” (whatever they were suggesting). But you are right, some people have some very problematic ideas about gender.
Remember when we thought Octomom was crazy? This really is some weird ethics.
Entonces detente con las publicaciones de instagram…idiota.
a fertility doctor, aka a reproductive endocrinologist, is not in the business of telling patients whether they should or should not have a baby. if you show up and want a baby, they’ll help you get one. it doesn’t surprise me at all that she was able to find a surrogate. the process takes longer than you think (finding the right surrogate, lawyers reviewing the surrogacy contracts, the IVF and implantation process, etc), so it’s entirely possible the surrogacy was already in the works before she got pregnant with Edu.
She clearly harvested her eggs prior to pregnancy with the intention of gender selection if her next baby was a male. That’s just insane, IMO.
I know this doesn’t have anything to do with her stupid over-worked uterus, but can I just say how much it BURNED my ass to see her, upon posting a pic of the now-family-of-8, refer to them as ‘Baldwinitos’. As far as I’m concerned, in doing that, the bitch just DOUBLED-DOWN on her fake-Spanish grift. I want to mention HOW deeply offensive I found the whole thing, esp when I think about MY father who fled Cuba at age 12 w/ his family of 5, they had $30 in their pockets and none of them spoke a word of English, and they STRUGGLED. Subsequently my father got a PhD from Harvard on a FULL scholarship, his one sister is a criminal psychologist AND warden of the biggest women’s prison in Dade County and his other sister is a successful lawyer. (In fact the lawyer aunt helped the warden aunt divorce her cop husband who was moon-lighting as an armed robber. No bullshit) My father kinda recently passed which is kinda why I wanted to brag about him a little but also when he was alive he definitely got treated as ‘exotic’ a lot of the time, ESP in Boston, where he met my mom, which he on occasion DID leverage. It made me SO MAD to see Eee-la-thia commercialize her FAKE exotic-ness while experiencing NONE of the struggle.
La perra no quiere aprendar!!!!
Your dad sounds like an amazing person. (And I totally can see how aggravating Hilaria’s Spanish schtick would be to you.)
Thank you! He was! I have to admit its a DAILY struggle not to fall into Meghan McCain/MyFather-style diatribes!
in my town growing up, doctors wouldn’t tell you the gender prior to childbirth as there was too much abortion based on gender. So it became unethical. The entire premise of gender selection seems a bit unethical to me.
Okay. Fine we will; however we’ll be sitting over here waiting for Hilaria to start. She’s made a career of yoga poses showing us the goods. **shudders**