Gabrielle Union Got Extremely Real About Her Surrogacy Experience

Six years after welcoming her daughter, Kaavia, via surrogacy, Gabrielle Union still has complicated feelings about the experience. The Riff Raff star spoke about parenting in a Marie Claire interview published on May 7, and she candidly revealed that using a surrogate was a “mind f*ck” for her and even “felt like a cuckold.”

Candid Reflections

Union — who shares Kaavia with husband Dwyane Wade and is stepmom to his older children — isn’t one to shy away from sharing her truths. After first noting that “every single person’s surrogacy journey is different,” she told Marie Claire that not being able to carry her own child “felt like a failure” to her.

“My body failed,” she said. “It just felt like such a f*cking public humiliation. Surrogacy felt like a cuckold; watching somebody do something I can’t do. To be there for somebody else succeeding where I failed — it is a mind f*ck for people who have had my journey and who feel similarly.”

The actor admitted she still hasn’t come to terms with it. “I’ll never have peace with it, ever,” she said. “And that’s not a what-anybody-has-to-say thing; that’s just — my yearning has never dissipated.”

Nonetheless, Union said she’s “very grateful to [their] gestational caregiver.” And of course, the most important part: “My baby’s here and my baby’s awesome.”

Road To Parenthood

Union opened up about her struggles to become a mother in her 2017 memoir, We’re Going to Need More Wine, including facing miscarriages and in vitro fertilization (IVF). “I have had eight or nine miscarriages,” she wrote, per People. “For three years, my body has been a prisoner of trying to get pregnant — I’ve either been about to go into an IVF cycle, in the middle of an IVF cycle, or coming out of an IVF cycle.”

It didn’t help that Wade fathered a child with another woman when they briefly split in 2013. Her second memoir, 2021’s You Got Anything Stronger?, addressed the complicated situation. “To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience,” she wrote, per USA Today. “The experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily while I was unable to left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind.”

Just weeks after Kaavia was born in November 2018, Union gave another poignant look at their journey. She posted a photo of her and Wade on the night they decided to “embrace faith” that their daughter would come, sharing some of the pain they experienced in her Instagram caption.

“For lots of people/families who have been on their own unique fertility/family creation journey, hope can feel like a cruel joke that plays on repeat,” she wrote, in part. “You stop letting yourself get excited and you dont [sic] dare utter any updates. You carry it all. It can feel isolating and depressing. You wonder if you are defective. You are not. You wonder if you are worthy. You are. You feel you feel you feeeeeel. You are not alone. You are loved and worthy and every feeling is real and understood.”