Everything Is Content - Everything in Conversation: Lily Collins & The Ethics of Surrogacy

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

It's the extra episode!! This week we're diving into the most divisive topic we've done yet: the ethics of surrogacy. Our DMs were flooded with requests for this, after Lily Collins and her husband got a huge amount of backlash for sharing the news that they'd welcomed a baby into the world through surrogacy.Thank you so much for your thoughts on this one. Just a reminder to follow us on the gram (IG, Insta, whatever you want to call it) to join in the discourse. We read out listener messages to help shape our own opinions and reflections in these Wednesday episodes.IG AND TIKTOK: @everythingiscontentpod-------It’s no wonder millennial women are annoyed by Lily Collins’s surrogacy – they can’t afford their own kidsLike Lily Collins, I welcomed my children through surrogacy. Why do I have to justify that decision?The joy and the trauma of carrying a celebrity's babyFamilies created through surrogacy: Mother-child relationships and children’s psychological adjustment at age 7Full Surrogacy Now Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth I'm Richera and I'm Anoni and this is everything in conversation this is a little midweek snack we whip up to help get you through the week we update you on the biggest pop culture stories from the week before exploring a bigger topic with your help remember if you want to take part in these extra episodes just follow us on Instagram at everythingiscontentpod. That's where we vote on topics and ask for all of your thoughts. This week, there was one topic heavily requested by you, which is Lily Collins and celebs using surrogates. But first, the headlines from the EIC newsroom. This year's Met Gala theme has been announced as Tailored for You. The accompanying exhibition will be super fine tailoring black style and will explore the role of sartorial

style in forming black identities and the black dandy. Joan Didion's diary of post-therapy notes is going to be published. In 46 entries dating back to December 1999, she discussed alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and the complex relationship with her daughter. The book Notes to John will be published on April 22nd. An X-rated AI meme of a naked Kanye West has gone viral with celebrities sharing the image after Bianca Sansori's nude Grammy stunt was branded as misogynistic. After three years, Euphoria season three has finally begun filming. Tesla's sales plummet across Europe. Registrations in Germany have fallen 59% amid consumer backlash against Elon Musk and his politics. Gisele Bundchen thrives after her divorce from Tom Brady.

TMZ reports that the supermodel has given birth to her third child, her first with her jiu-jitsu instructor-turned-boyfriend, Joaquin Valente. from Tom Brady. TMZ reports that the supermodel has given birth to her third child, her first with her jiu-jitsu instructor-turned-boyfriend, Joaquin Valente. Alligator Bites, Never Heal by Dochi, and SOS Deluxe Lana by SZA are the only albums by a black female artist to earn 10 million streams in a single day this year. Rihanna fans, rejoice.

The singer has recorded new original music for the Smurfs movie soundtrack And is a Smurfette in the trailer The film is out 18th July Move over Mudang A zoo in Tacoma, Washington Has announced that their tapir, Yuna Gave birth to a rare and endangered

Malayan tapir calf on Sunday night The newborn, covered in distinctive white spots And stripes, resembles a fuzzy Walking watermelon It's only the second tapir born in the Sunday night. The newborn, covered in distinctive white spots and stripes, resembles a fuzzy walking watermelon. It's only the second to appear born in the 120 year history, they said. Also jokes moved on. Still love you. Why am I crying? A former music executive has called out Chapel Rhone after her Grammy speech condemned music labels for not paying a livable wage or healthcare to artists. The former exec claimed, quote, no one comment on X under the story is, quote,

Megan Thee Stallion and Psy of Gangnam Style fame are set to star in a K-pop competition series titled K-popped where western icons reimagine one of their biggest hits collaborating with top tier K-pop idols to deliver spectacular battle performances with a live soul-based audience picking the winner of the best new K-popped song. And that's all from Headlines this week. Last week, Emily in Paris star Lily Collins shared that she and her husband Charlie McDowell had welcomed a baby girl through surrogacy. In a shared Instagram post, she wrote, Welcome to the centre of our world, Tove Jane McDowell. Words will never express our endless gratitude for our incredible surrogate and everyone who helped us along the way. We love you to the moon and back again. The response was

so divided online and even in our DMs this has been definitely I would say one of the most divisive topics we've ever had. We're not surprised that you really wanted to talk about this honestly. Charlotte Cripps wrote for The Independent, She went on, there's also speculation that Collins, along with other A-list celebrities, may have hired a surrogate in an effort to stay thin and preserve her body in what is termed social surrogacy. This is when women choose not to be pregnant for non-medical reasons, often to prevent disruption to their career. So many celebrities have used surrogates, so this is not, you know, an anomaly, it's not rare. It's very widespread. People like Paris Hilton, Nicole Kidman, Rebel Wilson, Khloe Kardashian, Kim Kardashian, Andy Cohen,

and Sarah Jessica Parker have all used surrogates. Chrissy Teigen is also another one. And she shared that she and her husband, John Legend, welcomed their fourth child via surrogate in 2023 and chose a name for the child to honor the woman who carried him. We want to say thank you for this incredible gift you have given us Alexandra, she wrote on Instagram, and we are so happy to tell the world he is here with a name forever connected to you with Alexander Stevens.

Before we dive into the super divisive topic, I wanted to do a context point which is with Lily specifically, she's spoken about struggling with eating disorders and has shared that she has a history of bulimia and as a result of that they stopped her periods. She said all of this in her 2017 memoir Unfiltered. No shame, no regrets, just me. So with all of the backlash her husband Malcolm McDowell took to social media and said that there were a lot of unkind messages. He wrote it's okay to not know why someone might need a surrogate to have a child. It's okay to not know the motivations of a surrogate, regardless of what you assume.

Before we go into listener questions, what do you both think about this whole thing? I read a piece in Glamour by Sophie Bresner, who also had a surrogate, and she had a surrogate due to having had cancer. And in her piece she read surrogacy is unquestioningly a practice reserved for a privileged minority and I count myself among them it's expensive extortionally so if like ours it doesn't go to plan medically the process is straight IVF and as such it might take several tries and a round of treatment is several

thousand pounds in this country and tens of thousands of pounds in America and her piece was really good and very empathetic and generous in her storytelling but I think that is one of the elements that really enrages people because having a baby is something that if you want it you really want it and the fact that it's inaccessible to certain people IVF can be really expensive surrogacy is beyond the reach of the limits for most people so I think that level of exclusivity is really difficult but then I guess the other angle is which we'll come on to this idea of just women's bodies being used for labor and I have read pieces from women usually quite religious women who say it is one of the greatest privileges of my life to be able to give up my body to give someone else a child and some people are doing it with that real sense of altruism and joy and some people

love pregnancy and it can be you know for a family member or something but I guess the darker side and the bit that does worry me a bit like with sex work in any situation where a woman is forced into looking for ways to find not even financial stability just a source of income through using her body through something that can be dangerous, traumatizing, that's when it gets quite scary. And so I sit on the fence with knowing I don't feel any judgment towards individuals. But I do fear that it feels like it's happening more and more often in sort of celebrity circles. And some people like to say that, you know, certain celebrities

do this because they want to retain their figure. They don't want to go through pregnancy. It's for vanity reasons. And if that is true, and if the woman that is carrying the baby is someone that is not necessarily forced into it, but is in a position where she feels like she has no other choice, then I feel very conflicted about the ethics of it. What about you, Bea? I feel similarly. And I would say until the last couple of years, I have never had a fully formed opinion on this. This escaped so much of my reading, so much of my feminist thoughts, so much of the conversations that I was taking part in and observing. And I just think that's really interesting. I don't know whether that's

maybe me not being a mother, being a young woman, just not taking it seriously as an issue, or whether it just has bubbled up and over to the surface now in terms of like being a talking point and a, you know, hot button issue right before our eyes. Like it feels like a moral and ethical issue that until maybe the last 12 months, especially the last week and a half, hasn't really been something I've grappled with. And I think just to draw on one point that you made about the exploitation, I think it's totally fair to fear exploitation here, but then you can't undo this. You can't stop surrogacy at any level. And so I think it's about considering the root cause of that exploitation, which as you said, it's powerless women, it's desperate women, it's poverty, inequality and injustice. So I think that's the problem then. I think really, if we're going to worry about it, you know, less surrogacy and

more poverty. And I haven't seen so many of the surrogacy or the anti-surrogacy advocates discussing that rather just focusing on a woman's body as the site of labour, which it is a labour issue, I think. And every person on earth uses their body for labour. The point is, are you protected? Are you safe? And maybe that's the question that I can't quite find an answer to. Is it safer that this is viewed through the framework of work? Is it safer to kind of allow it and sign off on it only when it is pure altruism? Like, is it safer to have the framework of this is a labour exploit and so you need to be protected as a worker or does that then open up the floodgates for the exploitation of okay great sums of cash can be exchanged for use of a woman's body and for in the end a baby or

since it is work is that just the only decent thing to do so I am just I'm really grappling with it. Ruchira do you have any sense No, I'm hoping that this episode will help shape my thoughts on it because I completely get pulled also into the fear around surrogacy and I definitely appreciate and understand the flip side which is why are so many celebrities using surrogates? I can really get drawn into the conspiracies around it to be honest around you know social surrogacy, the idea of preserving your body and all the stuff we know about how the industry is not kind to pregnant women it isn't kind to women whose bodies change and rehabilitating their careers as a result of that I'm not pushing that argument down I think that is a legitimate fear around all of this the

other thing is there is fear around women's bodies being used and a price on that because even you know in The Handmaid's Tale that is a tale of women's bodies being used to house a baby for rich families. So that fear has been put across us. It's a fear that we all can relate to having seen that portrayed on TV. So I don't know it's a very it's very scary topic. It's very confusing topic. I'm really excited that we're tackling it rather than avoiding it. I think that's a good thing. I think it is scary when you frame it

like in terms of the hand-mised tale because when you do zoom out and when you look at the way that society is going and you look at the disparity in wealth and the way that people are living their lives and the rise of tech and just kind of this massive gap that is spreading and also the focus on women's bodies,

the focus on thinness, the focus on hustle culture and the ability to be productive the whole time and rich people outsourcing constantly. It reminds me of the James Watt episode we did, where it's kind of like, if you're rich enough, you can kind of get anyone to do everything for you. And that is really, really scary. On the other hand, because I was thinking, so my sister has awful pregnancy. She gets really, really sick and she's had two children she was like I can never ever I just can't put my body through that again and I think if I had gone through pregnancy and it was okay and she asked me in years to come I potentially would do that for my sister so I don't think surrogacy in its entirety is necessarily wrong and as I said there are people that enjoy it but

it is definitely that changing of hands it's the fact that we're seeing it in very rich people. But as I said, the piece that I read in Glamour, the woman had had cancer. And, you know, I think it's an incredible thing that people who are desperate to have a child, and I think it's maybe confusing for us as well, because all of us are slightly on the fence about motherhood. But I recently watched, I can't remember if we spoke about this, have have you guys watched Joy the film about creating IVF with James Norton and Bill Nighy no I haven't no no no I've heard a lot of people talking oh my god so I watched it actually a couple of weekends ago I don't know why I didn't say for what I've been loving because it was so beautiful and it really moved me as in I was like sobbing uncontrollably and as someone that doesn't necessarily know if I want or will

end up having children who knows it was the power of this story of every woman deserves the choice to have a child and when someone really wants a child it becomes your lifelong journey and I think people like Elizabeth Day have been really great examples of just how soul-destroying it can be when you can't achieve that and so I do really believe that women should have every option and it's such a wrought issue because it's something that we're taught that we can just do, you know, as a woman, you're supposed to be able to do it. I think I agree exactly with what you said, Beth, is I think surrogacy can be safe. I think it can be beautiful. I think the problem here is the structures with which it's existing within.

I think also in the US, which is difficult from the UK, you can just pay people large sums of money. We have very different laws. There is also like surrogacy tourism where people travel to different countries every country has different laws about it around whether or not the surrogate mother is allowed to keep the child if she changes her mind and I think in the UK you're allowed to pay a surrogate for their living costs and for their welfare but you can't literally pay them like a fee so again sorry I'm not giving any concrete answers I think that it exists in two opposing planes for me on the one hand I think it's one of the most beautiful generous things a person can do for someone else and on the other hand we know the statistics on the dangers of

birth the dangers of pregnancy like what it is to put your body through that and that scares me to just return briefly to the handmaid's tale reference because this is always always brought up in these discussions and it's a dystop fear. It's a dystopian novel about something which at present isn't happening. We don't have camps of women forced to give birth, forced to be pregnant. And as Chloe said in our messages, I advocate for bodily autonomy. Therefore, I think we shouldn't label surrogacy as bad. And it's that bodily autonomy. It is the freedom to enthusiastically consent, knowingly and informally consent to pregnancy, birth, the way that you do both what happens before, during and after. And it is worth saying that, you know, in the UK where this issue has

been thought out, where the laws at least feel quite considered, especially when you look at, you know, other places in Europe, it's just impossible to do at all. It's blanket bans in, I think, Germany, Italy, Spain, maybe France as well. You can do it. There are guidelines in place. There is at least some framework in terms of the legality of it. We aren't in a dystopian handmaid's tale. And overwhelmingly, the majority of surrogates in this country are having positive experiences. They are not traumatised, they're not kind of used and abused. And it certainly makes sense to fear for countries where that's not the same to kind of be across the conversation about surrogacy tourism, as you mentioned, but I don't think it makes sense to legislate from a position of future dystopia of fear. It makes a lot more sense to look at what we're doing now and kind of tweak it and perhaps be a

bit more supportive and perhaps look at where surrogates can be propped up better and where abuse could thrive but I just think that is it's an argument for informed consent it's not an argument against surrogacy and by it I mean the handmaid's tale. One thing that came up when I was looking through comments is this belief that removing a child from the woman who has been pregnant with it is cruel for the baby and it leads to all of these issues and I couldn't find anything to support that. I wonder where that comes from. I found a research paper from the National Library of Medicine and the paper's called Families Created Through Surrogacy, Mother-Child Relationships and Children's

Psychological Adjustment at Age 7 and it was published in 2011 and it says there were no differences found from maternal negativity, maternal positivity or child adjustment although the surrogacy and egg donation families showed less positive mother-child interaction than the natural conception families. That's the only thing I could find but i think a lot of the discourse really swings quite heavily into this is so dangerous and i feel like that's also driving such a wedge into this debate because there's this you know really strong belief that children are harmed in the process and it makes sense why this is such an emotionally charged subject if those are the stakes that people are putting onto this but i don't think from what the science is saying that that really backs that up.

We had an interesting message from Jess actually which said which I wonder if relates to kind of that myth which said some of the backlash comes from a weird bio-essentialist alt-right place who believes it's traumatizing to the newborn but those people also don't support adoption and particularly gay adoption for this reason. It's a bit of a weird venn diagram but i went down a bit of a rabbit hole on x because i was surprised how strongly people felt about it and these accounts that a campaign against surrogacy also campaign against gay adoption and no surprises are super transphobic so that also makes sense to me because what's so stressful about this all actually is the thing we should be worrying about which is what we've outlined is the well-being the emotional economic financial

well-being of these women who are giving up their bodies but these arguments always get hijacked by people who have these ulterior motives which are usually down to evangelical and puritanical roots think about you know abortion laws and it's actually coming from a place that isn't anything about women's safety but it's about really old-fashioned ideology and that film joy which i'll reference for the last time was so amazing because the person the man who invented ivf or who was starting this program to try and work out how it works also performed abortions was one of very few people that did it at the time and a a woman that goes to help him, and she's really instrumental in the creation of IVF, finds out he does abortions and says to the sister on the ward, like, I can't believe you kill babies. I thought we meant to

be making babies. And the sister replies to her and goes, we're not killing babies or making babies. What we're doing is giving women the choice, which is just like so powerful. And I think that's what this has to be about. Again, it's the same end of the same coin. If women are doing this out of genuine choice, desire, belief, and want to, I really just don't think there's any way anyone can have a problem with it. Yeah, I agree. I think as we're having this conversation, my thoughts are kind of crystallizing and shaping. I think it really does come to a class, race, price thing for me. And I don't know if you can really police that it is just quite uncomfortable the idea that money grants you the ability to do that in a way that other people

cannot and also the fact that so many celebrities are doing it I I would hope that all of those people are doing it because they're struggling with fertility and it's not a vanity thing but that kind of looming fear that some people have the means to do it so they don't have to carry is just kind of looming around still in this conversation for me just on the biology i think surrogacy kind of disrupts something in the minds of these kind of biological essentialists within people who see womanhood motherhood family through a very narrow lens because it turns on its head the accepted order and the kind of Christian order, the woman in a heterosexual union conceiving naturally,

giving birth, and then mothering that child. Whereas in the case of surrogacy, everything is disrupted. And as somebody who I try and see the family and the model of the family through as radical a lens as possible, that's an exciting thing. For them, I think it's a thing to be feared. It's a woman giving birth to a child that that woman will not mother, who maybe even sees the process of motherhood, not as a miracle, but as pure labour, who may then deliver that child into the hands of, it could be two men, family unit that looks nothing like the traditional family. And I think that's not the core issue for everybody that's anti-surrogacy. If you are anti-surrogacy, I think you have to look at who your bedfellows are and who is on your side and

what they're saying. And as we can see from the banning of it across Europe, it has its deep roots in anti-LGBTQ beliefs. Like I didn't know until the last maybe four years that surrogacy was illegal in so many places that in, I think, Italy, like if you want a child as a same-sex couple, you really have no recourse. You cannot adopt, you cannot do IVF, you cannot have a surrogate carrier. You also cannot travel to another country for your surrogacy. So, you know, no fears of tourism there. You just don't have that option. And I think when you look at it through the choice lens, which we have just done, then it becomes very frightening. Then it becomes less about the harms that could happen

and more about the harms that are happening and the kind of narrowing window on what is allowed and who is allowed kind of into the realms of family life. And I think that is often neglected from that side, I will say. Looking at family through a radical lens, which is such a great way of framing it, is also so interesting because historically the way that we've raised children would have been, it takes a village to raise a child as a saying for a reason. Women or family members, like other women would breastfeed your

child for you if you were sick. People would raise your baby for you if something happened. It really was a community business where children would be being looked after by various mothers and fathers and people being fed for them, cared for them, bathed by them. It's only really in recent times that we have had this idea of this nuclear family. I also thought your point, Beth, about pointing out the fact that women are looking at childbirth and labour as a labour, of which it is, of which we have been sheltered from for so long. And now the truth of the amount of work, emotional, physical work that goes into producing a child has been unveiled to us through women finally being given the voice to talk about just how harrowing and difficult can be

has actually given us all quite a big level of anxiety because for so long we were taught it was this really beautiful gorgeous thing I even saw literally yesterday this woman beautiful lovely woman doing this video like I'm gonna film my video before I'm pregnant because I just want to see what happens she does a video and she's like, this is me. And she lifts her top up. She's got shorts on. Then she goes to the video when she's like 39 weeks pregnant. She's really heavily pregnant. She looks gorgeous. She's glowing. She's obviously bigger because she's pregnant. And then afterwards she does her body video. And again, she's seven months postpartum. Her body is very different, but she's like, I look really different. And she's so happy. And she's like,

but I'm a mom and it's the best thing in the world and it's so sweet to watch lots of things about her change her voice really changes her face it's different like it's such a massive thing to go through that you do physically change and the comments especially from men were so awful and it's just like who the fuck do you think you are first of all they want us all to go through this this isn't to say that I agree with like surrogacy as a means to not change your body but it's like those same men that are so anti these things are also the same people shaming women for doing something which is one of the most gargantuan tasks that for years we've just been told is like some oh beautiful lovely thing and actually a bit like Night Bitch that film that we spoke about not long ago the journey to motherhood is absolutely fucking crazy like

it's genuinely unbelievable. And I think that the real only problem I see in this, as so many people have messaged, is this idea that we're outsourcing birth to working class or less privileged people. But maybe the idea of a radical lens is actually the opposite. It's we need to go back to that. What's radical is this idea

that a woman will go through birth with no complaints pregnancy be probably unsupported by a man who will also probably go and cheat on her when she's postpartum as all the statistics say the majority of affairs happen when a woman is postpartum because a man feels like he's not being given any attention and that we won't have family nearby us to support us. That is radical. That's kind of wild. We need to go back to a time when it was much more community-based. And perhaps there is a world

where that includes ethical surrogacy. Speaking of that, I just ordered a book called Full Surrogacy Now, Feminism Against Family by Sophie Lewis, which was probably the top most recommended book when I went looking and talking to people. I was like, well, what should I read on this topic? People said people said this and it's a Verso book Verso being a great radical publishing company published some of my faves if you don't shop there you should go and have a look immediately

but this looks fascinating and from what I can gather and it hasn't arrived yet so I can't give any take on it but it's a feminist take on gestational justice and this is a quote a communist defense of surrogates and surrogacy and apparently asked the question of what would it look like if we didn't fetishize this biological connection to children and instead considered as you say and only a fairer and more communal way of performing reproductive labor and having a family so i will obviously report back when this arrives but i'm very excited that there are these like foundational fundamental texts out there that I had no idea about, that people have taken the time to think about this

and that hopefully then I can read this and become more guided and grounded in my opinions and that I don't have to have a knee-jerk reaction. And to be fair, our DMs are filled with people that have obviously thought about this a lot, both a personal standpoint and a kind of social one. And I think everyone's concerns are very rooted in reality but we also got so many like personal stories and someone said my sister was unable to conceive and had my niece and nephew through a surrogate they're the loves of my life and I think that's always the side of it isn't it the existing joy that surrogacy has brought to people's lives the children that do exist like

Lily Collins and I forget her partner's name that child exists in the world because of loving parents who wanted them so badly to exist it's it's much harder to then talk about it as an abstract thing it's not it's very real I think the problem is just the capitalist element of it all I think if that was removed there wasn't the side of class being involved money being exchanged it was we were going right back to our roots or we were talking about queer couples or we were talking about poly couples and this idea as you say of rearing in communities surrogacy would just have a completely different definition to the cultural definition we have of it today we had quite a few messages from queer people as well saying that like we need to give people the space and respect to understand that

you know everyone deserves to have a child if that's what they want and I was thinking about one of my cousins him and his husband were looking into adoption for years and they eventually gave up because it is so hard to adopt it's really hard to adopt as a gay couple the hoops you have to get through in order to be even if like they'll be like oh the stairs to your flat actually aren't quite right for like a child and it's like if you're able to have a child just naturally then no one's asking you what your house looks like no one cares if it's up a flight of stairs it's I do think that the barriers to entry for adoption are so difficult and adoption is a whole other conversation but also the care system in the UK is so bad the rates of people when they do adopt actually returning those children because the children end up being so traumatized by the

system which is very hard to get out of a really high. And I think that's another conversation to be had. And also a lot of children that end up in adoption at a very young age have come from parents who suffer from drug addiction. And again, it goes back to that thing of supporting people from the root, from the point of when they get into poverty, when they reach for addiction, when they are struggling as non-parents rather than damning and condemning the children or the people that want to be parents later on or the women that turn to surrogacy. It's such a tangled web where we're often looking at a symptom of a problem. And yes, always rich, privileged people will profit from the symptoms of poverty.

That is just the truth in every case and instead of us all shouting about whether or not rich women are leveraging this rich people are always going to leverage the the ways in which people are undervalued within society and so I think the question needs to be how do we make it more even how do we make it so fewer people are suffering are looking for ways out are struggling with addiction are all of that and I think like the care system and adoption as well that's it's such a complicated tangled web where people love to say like oh well if you can't have kids you should just adopt some people don't want to adopt and I think that is your prerogative but also it's really just not that easy.

On the topic of celebrity surrogacy which which I guess is the root of this, even though the conversation is so much broader, there was a great piece a few years ago, a great written piece for the BBC called The Joy and Trauma of Carrying a Celebrity's Baby. And it's, I think, a second person account of a woman who did that, who, first of all, she carried a quite bona fide celebrity's baby, had a really, that the celebrities are unnamed had a really positive experience and then went on to carry a baby for her friend and her name is Shanna and she gets pregnant with a baby for I think a woman from a celebrity family um and while pregnant she gets a call from the woman who says look I want to tell you right now before you see on the news I was also using another surrogate she's just given birth this. This is the situation. And then hangs up the phone

and this woman, Shanna, is like flooded with panic. She's like, what does this mean? Like, does she not want my baby? And she can't kind of get hold of the woman for a few days. The communication changes. And there have been these other red flag moments where she's very hands off. She doesn't want to have this even friendly relationship with Shanna. There's another one where the woman shames a former surrogate for having a mis Shanna. There's another one where the woman shames a former surrogate for having a miscarriage. There's one where she just kind of tries to ply her with Valium and tells her to chill out. And it's just a very, it's obviously one situation, but it paints a very dark picture of what can happen when someone with access does treat it

like a cold, hard business when they treat you as though you're kind of the factory pushing out a baby. And the story sadly culminates in Shanna having a miscarriage. And this other woman is just monstrous about it. You know, there's no communication, no shared pain. She just sends a message back being like, our relationship has ended, send along your final bills. And I think it will link the piece. I think it is a very balanced look of what can happen and what doesn't always happen. And, you know, celebrity surrogacy, I think celebrities, they're people, but I think they probably have among them some of the worst of us. I think it nurtures that. I think it encourages that. I think they can thrive. And

that's what would make me nervous in that situation that some women of lower income could be treated monstrously, but that's not the whole picture. It's just a glimpse into individuals acting that way and deciding and kind of viewing motherhood through a lens and viewing pregnancy through a lens, which it never was. But yeah, like I said, I'll link the piece. I thought it was a very balanced take on it, on something that I never even knew was going on. understand the backlash 100% and agree we're getting in some really murky territory with women getting paid to be surrogates, especially as it seems to be becoming a thing in Hollywood. But I don't love that two new parents who've got a born baby are being attacked. And I think it should be looked at as a societal rather than individual lens. We don't know everyone's individual circumstances. Thank you so much for listening and for all of your opinions and takes on this topic we love being in conversation with you all and if you haven't already please do follow us on instagram and tiktok at everything is content pod we will see you as always on Friday. Bye!