Lena Dunham Opens Up About Fertility ‘Grief’ While Discussing Future Kids

Lena Dunham is hoping to expand her family soon despite fertility setbacks amid health issues.

Dunham, 39, spoke about enduring years of chronic illness in an interview with The Times published on Saturday, June 28. The Girls writer and star had a hysterectomy in 2017 in order to escape the excruciating pain of endometriosis. Still, she’s not giving up the dream of becoming a mother.

“It was a grief but it was also a relief,” she said of the surgery, during which doctors removed her uterus, cervix and one of her ovaries. “I thought I would have the opportunity to experience my fertility and my cycle waning and it never was. Instead it was a very quick, sharp cut-off … I will say we’re in the process of expanding our family in new ways.”

Although she didn’t divulge intimate information on the subject, Dunham added, “I want to safely meet our children and then figure out how to talk about it.”

In a December 2020 piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “False Labor,” Duham discussed the pain of “giving up on motherhood” after she attempted to have a baby following medical conditions, a stint in rehab and a painful breakup from her longtime boyfriend, Jack Antonoff.

“There is a lot you can correct in life — you can end a relationship, get sober, get serious, say sorry — but you can’t force the universe to give you a baby that your body has told you all along was an impossibility,” she concluded the memoir. “Weak animals die in the woods as their pack mates run ahead. Bad eggs don’t hatch. You can’t bend nature.”

She added: “The irony is that knowing I cannot have a child — my ability to accept that and move on — may be the only reason I deserve to be anyone’s parent at all. I think I finally have something to teach somebody.”

After a whirlwind romance, Dunham married English-Peruvian musician Luis Felber in September 2021 after she felt “it wasn’t possible to resist it.” They now live in the U.K. and are gearing up for future family life.

“In the long term our big dream is to have a farm situation in the countryside,” she told The Times. “And children with British accents skipping off to school in little hats and uniforms. It’s too charming!”

For now she fills her home with her and Felber’s two dogs (Ingrid and Cornichon) and five cats (Elegance, Rhett, Truman, Porsche and Smudge). “There are so many animals in the bed,” she said. “I can’t believe I’ve found someone who is as with it as I am.”

There are also two American mini pigs (Victor and Cherry) who still live in the U.S. with her parents, Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons. “Immigration is going to be really complex,” she shared.