Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO series Girls, announced in Vogue last week that a surrogate mother had given birth to a daughter for her and her Peruvian-British musician husband, Luis Felber.

She describes sitting between the surrogate mother’s legs as the baby was delivered, which, for some, sounded a bit too close to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, where Janine, the handmaid Ofwarren, gives birth positioned between the legs of Commander Warren’s Wife.

Nonetheless, among celebrities choosing surrogacy, Dunham has a sympathetic backstory. She outlined in an earlier Vogue article how endless, excruciating endometriosis pain led her to beg for a hysterectomy at 31.

She is not heartbroken when friends get pregnant, but says “the children who could have been mine do break my heart, and I walk with them, with the lost possibility, a sombre and wobbly walk as I regain my centre”.

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It is impossible not to feel empathy for Dunham, deprived by a painful, debilitating disease of the chance to carry her own child.

Surrogacy tends to be covered in one of two ways. Most commonly, there is an uncritical........

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