Everything Kim Kardashian Has Said About Surrogacy

Credit: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Lorraine Schwartz

Everything Kim Kardashian Has Said About Surrogacy

A true gift! While Kim Kardashian has repeatedly expressed gratitude for the woman who carried her third child, the reality star has also admitted that the surrogacy process was harder than she expected it to be. Kardashian and husband Kanye West are parents of daughter North, son Saint, daughter Chicago and son Psalm. The youngest two were born via surrogate in January 2018 and May 2019, respectively. After KKW Beauty founder suffered from placenta accreta during her first two pregnancies, the couple opted to hire a gestational carrier to expand their family. [jwplayer ZfvaEfvh-zhNYySv2] In February 2021, Kardashian and West called it quits. The Selfish author was declared legally single in March of the following year. Scroll through to revisit everything Kardashian has said about surrogacy over the years: [podcast_block]

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Name Game

Picking North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm’s monikers was the “hardest” decision Kim has had to make, she told Ellen DeGeneres in April 2022, explaining that choosing was “definitely” more difficult when welcoming the youngest two via surrogate. “When the baby's inside of you and you know the baby's coming, you try to come up with those and narrow it down,” she explained at the time. “But when I had a surrogate, I found that time would fly by faster and I wouldn't feel the pressure coming up with the name."

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Pro Tip

In a June 2021 KUWTK clip, Kim told Khloé how "scary" her first surrogacy experience was, saying, "I did a FaceTime first and then I invited them over for dinner with their two kids, Kanye and her husband. I wanted to meet them all face-to-face. I wanted to feel and see if this energy was going to work for us. She was amazing, and her husband was so great.”

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Sister, Sister

Kim called surrogacy “the best experience” in a March 2021 Keeping Up With the Kardashians clip, telling Khloé, "You know what giving birth feel like. I always say if you can do it, it’s such an amazing experience, but you’ll see that the love you’ll have for your kids is exactly the same. There’s no difference except there was someone else that was the carrier.”

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Communication Skills

“You get your surrogate attorney, you get your surrogate broker and then the broker recommended that we use a therapist that would communicate with me first and then communicate with her and kind of be our liaison,” Kardashian said of her experience with gestational carriers in a February 2020 episode of Laura Wasser’s “All Fair” podcast. “Towards the end, we got close enough where we could communicate really without that."

The Skims creator went on to explain, “[The therapist] would suggest, ‘Hey, I think you guys should communicate once a week through text, maybe on Mother's Day. She's a mother as well. Maybe get her a massage or something that's appropriate for her to pamper.' Things like going through the birthing plan, so if anything was uncomfortable she would be that buffer to say, ‘This is who I want in the room. What are you comfortable with? How does this work?'"

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Difficult Delivery

"I had something called placenta acreeta where the placenta grows inside your uterus," she went on to tell Wasser, 51, of her first pregnancy. "It's honestly what people would die from in childbirth, so you have to get the placenta out within a certain amount of time and you just can internally bleed. So, there's no choice — this is so graphic and gross — but he had to literally cut the placenta off with his hands, with his fingernails, inside of you. And it left a hole in my uterus, and so that muscle doesn't grow back. So I could not get pregnant with Saint." 

Because of this, Kardashian used an embryo to carry her eldest son, then surrogates for Chicago and Psalm.

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Sweet Start

Kardashian and Chicago had “skin-to-skin [contact] right from the beginning,” she went on to tell Wasser. “She came out and I knew she was, like, my twin. So I was like, ‘OK, God really did this to show me that I’m connected with her.' Because I was so worried at first.”

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Ideal Candidate

“It was important to me to find someone local so I can attend appointments,” Kardashian added of her surrogate choice. “What was important to me was to find someone that was in a relationship and had a supportive partner. … Race didn’t matter to me and that seemed to be a topic that people would ask me all the time.”

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Back to Back

"When I was pregnant with my daughter North, I had a condition called preeclampsia or toxemia, which is basically when the mom’s organs start to shut down,” the KKW Beauty creator said in a December 2019 Skims video. “The only way to get rid of that is to deliver the baby. At 34 and a half weeks, I had to go into emergency labor — they induced me. North was 4 pounds. She was almost six weeks early. After I delivered, my placenta never came out, so that’s called placenta creta. My placenta grew inside my uterus and that is what women die from in childbirth. After my daughter was born, I still continued to do the process of freezing my eggs. I was able to get pregnant through that with my son Saint, and then I had two embryos left. I had the same condition, same awful delivery that I had with my first daughter."

She explained, "After that, I actually had to have five different operations within a year and a half to fix the damage that all of that did from the inside. From the outside I was filming and [doing] photo shoots. I asked my doctors, ‘Can I do it one more time?’ And they were like, ‘We won’t even put an embryo in you — that would be like malpractice.'”

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A New Normal

“The fact that this is just what we can do these days, I'm like really thankful. … Like I'm seriously so grateful for her and that someone is just so like selfless and kind to do this,” the E! star explained during a November 2017 episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, filmed several months before Chicago was born. “It is frustrating, like, to not be able to do it on your own. It is a weird dynamic. Like, I go to all the doctor's appointments and I try to be really present, but when you're not carrying it yourself it is such a fine balance of how much you're going to be in their lives.” 

“Of course I want to know every last detail that's going on with my baby and that's super frustrating, but I really trust my surrogate and I don't want to be that person that's trying to control her every move,” Kardashian continued. “It's going to be a long, hard process but I'm going to take it one day at a time and hopefully it just gets easier.” 

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Giving Up Control

Kardashian admitted during a November 2017 interview with Entertainment Tonight that expecting a child via a surrogate is “really different” than being pregnant. "Anyone that says or thinks it is just the easy way out is just completely wrong. I think it is so much harder to go through it this way, because you are not really in control,” she said. “And, you know, obviously you pick someone that you completely trust and that you have a good bond and relationship with, but it is still ... knowing that I was able to carry my first two babies and not, you know, my baby now, it's hard for me. So, it's definitely a harder experience than I anticipated just in the control area."

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A Dream Come True

Three days after Chicago was born in January 2018, Kardashian penned a note to her followers about her surrogacy experience. "I have always been really honest about my struggles with pregnancy. Preeclampsia and placenta accreta are high-risk conditions, so when I wanted to have a third baby, doctors said that it wasn’t safe for my — or the baby’s — health to carry on my own,” she wrote on her website. “I’m so grateful for modern technology and that this is even possible. It’s not for everyone, but I absolutely love my gestational carrier and this was the best experience I’ve ever had. Our gestational carrier gave us the greatest gift one could give. The connection with our baby came instantly and it’s as if she was with us the whole time."

She concluded: "Having a gestational carrier was so special for us and she made our dreams of expanding our family come true. We are so excited to finally welcome home our baby girl." 

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Meet La'Reina

While she kept her back to the camera, Kardashian introduced her family to her first surrogate, La'Reina Haynes, during a March 2018 episode of KUWTK. "I didn’t really know what to expect because I don’t really know anyone that’s gone through this," Kardashian said in her confessional during the episode. "It was definitely not as easy as I thought it would be emotionally, but it’s so worth it." 

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10/10 Recommend

“It was a feeling. You know when you can trust someone,” the Selfish author told Elle in March 2018 about hiring Haynes. And while Kardashian admitted she “hated being pregnant,” she also told the magazine that she “still wished” she could have carried Chicago. “The control is hard at the beginning. Once you let that go, it’s the best experience. I would recommend surrogacy for anybody." 

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Best Decision Ever

Fans saw Kardashian bring Chicago home during a September 2018 episode of KUWTK. “Honestly, [now that] it's done, I think it was the best decision I ever made,” she said during the episode.

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So Connected

“It’s crazy how ... instantly when the baby came out, there was no weird feeling that I was so nervous about, [like] ‘Am I gonna feel the same way?’” Kardashian confessed on a September 2018 episode of KUWTK. “It was the same exact feeling [as with the other kids]. That was instantly a relief for me, because that's what I was most nervous about, and I just feel lucky that I've had such a good experience with surrogacy.”

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In God's Hands

Kardashian reiterated her concern about connecting with her child during a September appearance on Ashley Graham’s “Pretty Big Deal” podcast. “I think I was so nervous to have a surrogate and to have that connection that God was like, ‘I’m going to make her look just like you.'"