Elizabeth Banks says she feels “less than a woman” after struggling with infertility

Elizabeth Banks reflects on her surrogacy journey 11 years after welcoming her first of two children into the world and shares that her infertility still brings “so much shame”.

The 48-year-old actor has joined podcaster Alex Cooper on an episode of Call her daddy where Banks discussed her life with husband Max Handelman, beginning with their college meeting. While Banks described her dreams of marriage and family at the time as “traditional,” she explained the process of letting go of what it had meant to her when she discovered the impossibility of conceiving.

“I’ve never been pregnant and when I was young I thought it was because I was really good at taking the pill, which I definitely was. But I have no idea. There’s a small percentage of women who have basically unexplained infertility and so am I, I fall into that category,” Banks said. “I’ve always had a lot of eggs, I’ve never had trouble making embryos, they haven’t implanted . For some reason my uterus is hostile, I don’t know what’s going on but they just don’t want to stay in. That I had a broken tummy, I told my kids, Mommy had a broken tummy.”

Banks has previously shared publicly her journey with infertility and the judgment she faced when she and her husband made the decision to work with a surrogate to expand their family. “It’s been a long time before surrogacy was like a Kardashian thing. Nobody did it back then,” she reminded Cooper. Banks also addressed the grief she faced at potentially having to carry her own child before celebrating this alternative path to motherhood.

“Your fertility is such a part of your life, men and women. But for women, especially in a society, that’s why we value you, we don’t value you because you could be a CEO, we value you because you can breed me and keep the race going. So if you can’t do that, you’re less of a woman. That’s the message. And my fertility was something to mourn. I had to mourn that. It was a loss. And I really had to work through that before I could invite anyone to help me start my family,” she explained. “It was also confusing because it’s like my husband and I can make these beautiful baby cakes, and I just didn’t have an oven to bake them in. And so it was really my fault, you know what I mean? It was on me. And I felt that deeply, like I was the problem.

The story goes on

While she was still trying to carry a baby herself, Banks said she blamed her lifestyle when it didn’t work out and said she “did everything” to improve her chances.

“I stopped drinking, I stopped eating, then I started eating because someone was like, ‘You’re too skinny, you’re too so. You’re using this cream and it has a chemical in it.’ Okay, everything has a chemical in it,” she recalled. “It’s like everything you do is wrong.”

Banks explained that it was necessary to gain perspective to be more confident about the decision to proceed with surrogacy. She credited much of this to a number of friends who gave her advice throughout the process.

“I had an amazing friend who said, ‘At the end of the day there will be a baby and you will be a parent and no one will care how it happened,'” she recalled. “The other great advice I got was, ‘Is your goal to get pregnant or to be a mother?’ And I was like, ‘Oh shit. It’s just to be a mom. Right. I don’t have to be pregnant shit, I just want the baby.’ So it was about how best to have the baby? What do you do? Who cares about pregnancy? Get the baby.”

When Banks finally met a potential surrogate with whom she had “an incredible conversation,” she felt comfortable with the way she would expand her family. She explained that she is “still in a relationship to this day” with the surrogate mother who gave birth to 11-year-old Felix and 10-year-old Magnus. “Today is my son’s 10th birthday and I’m going to send her a picture of him because she helped start our family with us. Her mother was a surrogate, so that’s how she got involved. She had three beautiful children of her own with her amazing husband,” Banks said. “It takes the whole village for that.”

Now, 11 years after becoming a mother, Banks said the moment she held her son in her arms, worries about how he was born washed away. “It made everything else so stupid. So stupid. Everyone’s judging, it’s like ‘Oh fuck off’. Now they can judge me for being a parent,” she said. “It starts all over again, it’s a whole different side of the cycle.”

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