Adrienne Bailon Houghton is finally a mother and she’s opening up about the birth of her newborn son, Ever James Houghton.
Source: Stefanie Keenan / Getty
The actress and her husband, Israel Houghton, welcomed their first child together via surrogate last month and in a new interview with ET, the couple’s revealing some behind-the-scenes details about their journey, including more details about why they chose to keep the pregnancy a secret until their son was here.
“I hope that even by me not giving the information, it hopefully inspired somebody to say, ‘I don’t owe this to anyone, I don’t owe an explanation to anyone about why, how,’” Adrienne says about why she and Israel chose to keep the pregnancy a secret. “I think that there is that saying, ‘Get out of my uterus.’”
Additionally, Bailon shared that she helped deliver her son herself during his home birth and “pulled him out” of the surrogate.
“My sister filmed it, and when I watched it back, — it’s actually so cringy” said Bailon about the delivery. “Because you have an out-of-body experience,. You’re not thinking about, ‘Oh, what do I look like?’ So, when I watched it back, I literally was just saying over and over again, ‘I love you so much, I love you so much, I love you so much.’ I actually got a chance to pull him out. We did skin-to-skin and right on me.”
Ever is Adrienne’s first baby, while Israel has four children from a previous relationship. Their decision to use a surrogate to carry their son wasn’t an easy one, though, as it came after the former The Real co-host underwent multiple rounds of IVF over the years. She also shared that she has five embryos left should she want to have more children and she’s hopeful that she can conceive in the future.
“I know it sounds weird, but after everything I’ve been through, multiple miscarriages, I’ve done IVF eight times, so, I feel like to some extent, I owed it to myself to give myself that privacy, to give myself the right to have something sacred and something just for us, and our family,” Adrienne explained. “And that ultimately, I wasn’t going to disappoint anyone. I think it’s hard enough to deal with your own disappointment when you go through things like this, that it gets that much harder when you feel like you have to now explain to everyone else.”
She continued, “A lot of women will relate to this, but when you go through miscarriages or something like that, when you’ve announced already, you find yourself, when you’re telling them what’s happened, comforting them as well. And it takes so much out of us. Women are so strong, and I think we go through so much, that I wanted to go through this without anyone else’s opinions but ours.”
Check out the couple’s full interview with ET here.
