Adrienne Bailon opens up about welcoming her son via surrogate after undergoing 8 IVF cycles: 'He was my last embryo left'

Welcome to So Mini Ways, Yahoo Life's parenting series on the joys and challenges of child-rearing.

Thanks to the pandemic, a fair share of celebrity parents have been able to expand their families out of the public eye. But when Adrienne Bailon and her husband, gospel singer Israel Houghton, announced in August that they had welcomed a baby boy named Ever James, the surprise wasn't just that they'd kept the baby news under wraps; they'd also managed to keep their five-year-long path to parenthood, via IVF and ultimately surrogacy, private.

That doesn't mean that the TV personality wasn't subject to the odd invasive question as she secretly underwent eight IVF cycles. The injectable fertility drugs that Bailon took to boost her follicle production and stimulate her ovaries are known to cause bloating and weight gain in some women. The former Cheetah Girls star put on 20 pounds, which aroused some suspicion.

"The hardest part for me was when people thought the weight gain was because I was pregnant and [getting] that sort of question," she tells Yahoo Life's So Mini Ways. "That was really hard to deal with, especially with social media in the mix ... 'Oh, she must be pregnant, she's gaining weight.' And I'd be like, 'No, I'm not pregnant.' Mentally and emotionally, that was pretty tough."

In the "almost two years straight" that Bailon underwent IVF treatments, good news was few and far between. She remembers well the sting of coming up empty during egg retrievals.

"I had tried IVF multiple times and they'd be like, 'Girl, you got nothing,'" she says.

The process took both a physical and mental toll, with Bailon feeling "hormonal" thanks to her fertility medication while also undergoing procedures she found "excruciatingly painful."

"There were several times in my IVF journey where I was just like, I don't want to do this anymore," she says. "My body can't take this anymore. Like, I feel like I'm torturing my body to make something happen. And it was really difficult because my heart wanted this thing so badly, but my body was really fighting it."

All told, the former co-host of The Real produced three embryos. One was successfully implanted, but was later miscarried. One failed to implant. Baby Ever, Bailon notes, was "my last embryo left."

It was her sister who suggested taking that last embryo and trying something new: a gestational surrogate, who would be implanted with the embryo and, with luck, carry the pregnancy to term. Bailon admits struggling with the idea at first, saying, "People think that it can be, like, very glamorous — like, 'Oh someone else is gonna carry my child.'" But her view changed when her sister took her aside and asked, "What is it that you want?

"I was like, 'I want to be a mother,'" recalls Bailon, who prides herself on her close-knit family. "She was like, 'Does it matter how you get there, or is it the end result that matters the most?' And I was like, 'Wow. I never thought of it that way.'"

She also took comfort in the way one doctor explained the process to her young nieces: Say you're baking a cake at home and have mixed all the ingredients only to find out that your oven isn't working. You then run next door and ask to use your neighbor's oven. When the cake is done, it's still your cake. Getting that perspective, the new mom says, "made it so much easier for me to make peace with it."

The Daytime Emmy winner counts herself blessed to not only now have her son in her life, but to have had the option of going through IVF and surrogacy. Both are procedures many activists and medical professionals worry are under threat with the Supreme Court's overturning of abortion rights this summer.

"I absolutely think it's really scary that because of Roe v. Wade being overturned that the way that I became a mother may no longer be available to other people," Bailon says. "And that's really scary that IVF would be questioned or overturned; that letting science and medicine play a role in how we become moms is an issue. I am a very spiritual person. I believe in God; I believe in the word of God. And I also believe that God has given wisdom to these incredible scientists and doctors to make a way. ... I look at my son every day and I'm reminded of the favor and the faithfulness of God."

Motherhood, the new mom says, "has been an incredible fit for me." Like most parents of a young infant, she and Houghton are "delirious and exhausted." Mom guilt can flare up as she heads back to work on the Fox game show I Can See Your Voice. And while her family, which includes stepdaughter Mariah, is great at pitching in and watching the baby, Bailon has found it hard to be away from her little boy.

"The first two months of my son's life, I think because he was born from a surrogate, I felt like I didn't want to put him down," she admits. "Like I needed to create this bond with my baby. I needed him to know that I was his mom. And so I held my baby 24/7 for the last two months. So he does not enjoy being in a car seat. He does not enjoy a carriage. He just wants to be with me, on me. And I absolutely love it until I actually have to do things like go to the bathroom [or] possibly take a shower — and I've got a baby on me. It's the best and worst thing at the same time."

—Video produced by Stacy Jackman.

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