Olivia Munn reflected on her decision to use a surrogate to welcome daughter Méi amid her breast cancer battle.
“I was diagnosed with breast cancer and my type of cancer is a hormone cancer. Hormones in my body feed my cancer,” Munn, 44, told Self in an Instagram video posted on Thursday, April 10. “My doctors told me that carrying my own baby would put my life at risk. I know that it would put my life at risk, but I loved carrying my son, and I really, really wanted to carry my next child.”
Munn and husband John Mulaney welcomed their son, Malcolm, in November 2021. Two years later, the actress was diagnosed with stage 1 Luminal B breast cancer in both breasts.
“As I was taking my medication for cancer, those drugs were incredibly debilitating,” Munn explained. “I was just in bed all the time. I’d be able to get up in the morning, [but] I probably had during the daytime, like, maybe two hours of actual ability to interact with people and play with my son.”
According to Munn, the only way she could get off the hormone-suppressing medicine would be if she underwent an oophorectomy.
“An oophorectomy is when they remove your ovaries,” she told the outlet. “Because I was doing the oophorectomy already, I wanted to take out my uterus and my fallopian tubes because once you are diagnosed with cancer, you pretty much spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder and worrying about where else cancer could pop up.”
With the removal of her uterus, Munn was no longer able to carry a pregnancy and “had to go down the surrogacy route.”
“Above everything else, I just wanted [our gestational carrier] to be kind,” Munn said in her Self cover story. “She’s an incredible mother, an incredible human being, an incredible friend, just wonderful. I needed [her] to understand that I needed to go this route.”
She continued, “It wasn’t for superficial reasons or because I wanted to put my work first. I’m not saying that any of those reasons aren’t valid for those people. I’m not judging anyone who makes those decisions based on that, but I needed her to understand this would be hard for me.”
Both Munn and Mulaney, 42, were in the delivery room when their surrogate, who is still in their lives, gave birth to Méi.
“The first person John hugged was [our surrogate’s] husband, he gave him a big kiss on the cheek,” she recalled. “It was just wonderful.”
