Lena Dunham Welcomes First Child

Lena Dunham and husband Luis Felber have welcomed their first baby, a daughter, via surrogate, Dunham shared in a Vogue essay.

The couple, who tied the knot in 2021 and whose relationship served as the inspiration for Netflix’s 2025 Too Much TV series, are pictured with their baby daughter alongside the Vogue piece.

Dunham had a hysterectomy in 2018 due to her longtime battle with endometriosis. But she has said she still wanted to be a mom.

“Some people don’t dream about being mothers, but I had, and it was a big part of my identity that I was going to do it someday in that way,” Dunham said in an April interview with Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones on Today with Jenna and Sheinelle.

Timed to the release of Too Much, Dunham told the U.K.’s Times that she was in the process of “expanding [her] family in new ways.”

“I want to safely meet our children and then figure out how to talk about it,” she said.

It’s unclear exactly when Dunham and Felber welcomed their baby, though a New York Times report says the child arrived in August, but Dunham begins the op-ed with an anecdote from a “mild November morning.”

“I found myself kneeling by an exam table, fresh off a red-eye—with a rictus grin of anxious enthusiasm plastered on the lower half of my face while my eyes filled with anxious tears—clutching the hand of a woman I had met in person only twice,” she writes, before going into detail about meeting and getting to know the surrogate and her search for the right baby clothes.

And she explains being in the room when the baby was born, 13 days late, amid a “solar eclipse and meteor shower.”

“I sat on a hospital bed, between the legs of a woman I hadn’t known a year ago, waiting for a glimpse of this person who I had been waiting for with something related to patience, but also none at all,”

Dunham writes. “I was so focused on our surrogate — in awe at her concentration, her period of quiet followed by what sounded like a roar — I forgot to look down until I heard our baby’s cry. I saw her face, gasping just as she did. Her eyes, wide and unfocused, taking in the light and shadow, blinking rapidly.”

And she shares her first words to her child: “Hello. I’m your mama. You … you look nothing like I thought you would, but exactly right. We’ve been waiting for you, do you know that? It was so nice of you to come.”

Later, Dunham writes, “She wriggled in my hands, slick as a seal, naked as the day she was born.”