Khloe Kardashian is opening up again about her experience of using a surrogate for her second child, stating that she felt “detached” during the entire process.
Kardashian made the comments during a recent podcast episode of SHE MD, as she was speaking with her doctor, Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi, and host Mary Alice Haney. Kardashian specifically noted that since she wasn’t physically carrying her son, Tatum, she had difficulty feeling like the pregnancy was real.
“And then the entire pregnancy of my surrogate, I admittedly buried my head in the sand and I said to Dr. A, ‘I can’t do this.’ And the whole surrogacy pregnancy, I was really detached,” she said. “I couldn’t really face it. I very much think I was in denial that this is happening. So I didn’t get to really attach during the pregnancy part.”
She further stated that when it was time for the surrogate to give birth, she got upset because she wanted to spend more time with her older daughter before Tatum was born, and ended up “hysterically crying.”
“It wasn’t even about the weekend, it was about now this is real,” she explained on the podcast.
“She [Aliabadi] goes, ‘”You know what?’ I’ll deliver the baby. I’ll take the baby and you let me know when you’re ready to pick him up.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ I’m like, ‘Who does this? Who even offers that?’ And she did. And I remember I was like to myself, ‘Khloé, f–king snap out of it. This is life. We got to do this,’” Kardashian shared.
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Kardashian previously expressed these feelings on her Hulu show, “The Kardashians.”
“I felt really guilty that this woman just had my baby. I wish someone was honest about surrogacy and the difference of it,” she said during an episode. “I take the baby and I go to another room and you’re sort of separated. It’s such a transactional experience ’cause it’s not about him. It’s a mind f–k. It’s really the weirdest thing.”
Her experiences with surrogacy are not unique — and mothers aren’t the only ones who experience psychological effects from surrogacy. Children, too, are susceptible to both physical and emotional consequences from this experience of feeling like commodities, created only to satisfy the whims of their parents. Studies have also shown that being separated from a parent — either biological or surrogate — at birth is a “major physiologic stressor” for the baby. A baby bonds with the mother that carries her for nine months in her womb. Suddenly leaving the only mother she’s ever known will reportedly leave her susceptible to depression, abandonment issues, and emotional problems related to attachment, bonding, and self-esteem. However, as adoption seeks to heal the wound created by the separation from a biological parent who is unable at that time to raise the child, surrogacy creates a child with the intent to separate the child from the person who will carry, nurture, and give birth to that child.
Kardashian shared that it took about nine months for her to fully bond with Tatum, her biological son — the natural period of time a child spends in his mother’s womb.
