Why do celebs pose in hospital beds with their surrogate babies? Stars have faced backlash for ‘Handmaid’s Tale-style’ snaps with infants another woman has given birth to.

When Emily in Paris star Lily Collins and husband Charlie McDowell revealed this week that they’d welcomed a daughter via surrogacy, the couple were hit with ‘unkind’ comments from some on social media.

Film director McDowell penned an emotional Instagram post saying they’d been the victim of a ‘hateful’ response after sharing news of baby Tove’s arrival – and they are not the first celebrity parents to come under scrutiny for using a surrogate.

In his post, McDowell made the pointed remark that it’s ‘OK to not be an expert on surrogacy’, and indeed the machinations of the process can attract negative comments about ‘human trafficking’ and ‘rich people renting women’s bodies’.

One particular element that regularly causes an uproar is celebrities – both male and female – posing in hospital beds with their newborns, with one claiming it’s ‘airbrushing out the birthing mother’ who has just been through labour.

Bemused critics have suggested that the trend for sharing hospital bed photos echoes The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Attwood’s dystopian novel about fertile women who are forcibly impregnated by the husbands of the ruling class.

When the handmaid eventually gives birth, the Commander’s wife simulates labour surrounded by her friends and the baby is then handed to her as if she’s really just delivered her own child.

In May last year, flamboyant Texan hairdresser Joseph Ryan Wayne shared a video of him being handed one of his newborn twins as he reclined in a hospital bed.

The influencer, who shares moments from his professional and personal life across his social media platforms – he has 267,000 followers on TikTok – revealed he’d welcomed daughter Dylan and son Kyle via IVF and surrogacy with his husband Nathan.

US hairdresser Joseph Ryan Wayne, who has 161,000 followers on Instagram, shared the moment one of his newborn twins was handed to him, while he was in a hospital bed, after a surrogate mother gave birth to them

Special moment: Khloe Kardashian is seen holding her newborn son Tatum in a hospital bed in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in August 2022

In April last year, Alice Naylor-Leyland, a friend of Princess Beatrice, and her husband Tom, announced to the world that their fourth baby had arrived via surrogacy, with the couple sharing intimate photos of Alice in a hospital bed with her newborn

The photo sparked a shocking backlash, despite the stylist declaring he’d ‘never been more in love in my life’ than with the two sons he’d welcomed into the world.

Elsewhere, one of the most famous women on the planet, reality star Khloe Kardashian, also chose to share intimate footage filmed of her bonding with her newborn son Tatum in a bed in a private hospital room.

Season two of The Kardashians saw the now 40-year-old sitting on a bed, as a woman who had gone through labour might, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, as she held her baby son, whom she shares with ex partner Tristan Thompson.

The star had given birth to her daughter, True, in April 2018 but chose a surrogate to have Tatum, who was born in August 2022.

In an episode of the show, the star, dressed in a hoodie and with her hair neatly plaited away from her face, cradled her infant son in the private nursing suite.

She faced criticism for the image, with one social media user writing: ‘Something is off with people becoming parents via surrogacy and then taking pictures in a hospital bed with a new born. It’s completely unnecessary. They could have just posted a picture of the baby in it’s bassinet.’

On Mumsnet, another person added: ‘It’s bad enough men trying to erase women but when a woman tries to airbrush the birthing mother out of the picture it makes me feel a bit sick.’

The Good American founder has since revealed how hard the bonding process has been with her youngest child, telling the podcast’s co-host Dr Thaïs Aliabadi she had a hard time bonding with him before he was born via surrogate.

Paris Hilton, 43, stunned the world when she revealed she and her husband, Carter Reum, 43, had welcomed their second child, a baby girl named London, in November 2023, via surrogate

A birthing ceremony in TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale where the wife whose handmaid is giving birth pretends to go through labour

Khloe with her ex partner Tristan Thompson, who she shares daughter True with, and son Tatum, who was born via a surrogate

The reality star has spoken out about how she has struggled to bond with her youngest child

‘I wasn’t carrying him, I didn’t really feel anything,’ she said, which was exacerbated by the fact that no one knew about the upcoming baby – not even her family.

She had decided not to tell them about the surrogacy process until the embyro transfer was successfully completed.

But then her partner Tristan Thompson hit the headlines when it was revealed he’d fathered a child with another woman, so she continued to keep the news to herself.

‘The entire pregnancy of my surrogate, I admittedly buried my head in the sand,’ she admitted.

Speaking about the birth of her son in a 2023 episode of the Kardashians, she revealed: ‘I definitely was in a state of shock from my entire experience in general. I felt really guilty that this woman just had my baby and I take the baby and go to another room and you are separated.

‘It felt like such a transactional experience because it is not about him. I wish someone was honest about surrogacy and the difference of it. But it doesn’t mean it is bad or good. It is just very different.’

Khloe also admitted that it took some months to form a bond with her son, who she is now ‘obsessed’ with.

Socialite Paris Hilton welcomed both of her two children, son Phoenix and daughter London, with Carter Reum via a surrogate mother.

Actress Gabrielle Union and her husband Dwayne Wade admitted that people didn’t understand why they were pictured in a hospital bed with their daughter who was born via surrogate

The gossip blogger Perez Hilton in hospital with his newborn daughter Mayte Amor who was born via surrogate in October 2017

And the star also chose to share footage of herself embracing her newborn while the pair were in a hospital bed.

Hilton has spoken about her decision to use a surrogate in her reality TV show, admitting that it was ‘difficult’ because she ‘would have loved that experience of growing the baby in her tummy and feeling the kicks and all of those exciting moments.’

But she said she ultimately turned to surrogacy because felt she was unable to carry children herself due to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to alleged abuse she suffered while enrolled at Provo Canyon boarding school in Utah as a teenager.

‘If I’m in a doctor’s office, I get a shot, anything, I will literally have a panic attack and I can’t breathe,’ she shared.

‘I just knew that would not be healthy for me or the baby, growing inside of someone who has such high anxiety.’

Another high profile socialite, a close friend of Princess Beatrice, Alice Naylor-Leyland, decided too to share images of intimate first moments with her fourth baby last spring, when she announced that she and her husband had had a child using a surrogate mother.

The socialite already had three children with Tom Naylor-Leyland, who is heir to a baronetcy and the £176million Fitzwilliam landowning fortune.

Posting on Instagram, the then 38-year-old showed her adorable newborn Margot swaddled in pink fabrics.

The Emily in Paris star took to Instagram to repost a photo from husband Charlie’s account, where she was seen enjoying a walk with her newborn daughter, Tove, in a stroller

Posting on Instagram, the socialite, then 38, revealed her newborn Margot had been born to a surrogate

Meanwhile, Alice (centre) is a long-time friend of Princess Beatrice (left), and has been a Vogue columnist, a model and a fashion muse. Both pictured in 2022

‘Meet Margot, Our Little Miracle,’ the caption read. ‘Born 14.04.2024, We continue to feel very grateful for our precious Girl.’

Tom, 42, also took to his social media with snaps of his wife in the hospital bed with their new child.

Singer Gabrielle Union, who welcomed a surrogate daughter Kaavia in 2018, after suffering nine miscarriages has also been open about the criticism she faced.

‘I think for me the most hurtful thing was once we had our baby, and everyone started to talk about, “Why is she in the bed holding a baby, why she got a gown on, why she acting like she just had a baby?”,’ her husband Dwyane Wade told Oprah.

‘And it’s like, once again, people are uneducated on the process.’

So how does surrogacy work? It’s the process in which a woman carries and gives birth to a baby on behalf of another woman, often because she cannot get pregnant or carry a fetus herself.

A woman who decides to be a surrogate for another undergoes in vitro fertilization (IVF). During this process, she is impregnated when doctors create an embryo by fertilizing the intended mother’s egg (or an egg from a donor) with sperm from the father (or a donor).

The practice remains controversial, with some conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation calling it ‘exploitation’ that ‘turns the female body into a commodity for hire,’ and reduces women ‘to “rent-a-womb” service providers.’

Famous faces choosing to post images of themselves shortly after the birth of their newborn in a hospital bed however are simply likely sharing what is an important stage in bonding with a child born to surrogacy.

Skin-to-skin contact is widely used to help parents bond with their newborns regardless of who’s given birth to them.

Research has proven that putting the skin of a baby close to the person who will parent them can have strong benefits for bonding, on a physical and emotional level.

The most sensible time, say experts, is for that to happen as soon as possible, shortly after birth, which is why parents are often ‘admitted’ and may have a hospital bed where they can bond with their newborn.