On Valentine's Day, Melissa Harris-Perry took to Twitter to tell her followers that she is a new mother. She posted pictures of her new daughter wearing a onesie that reads, "daddy and mommy's little valentine."
On Tuesday, the MSNBC host revealed the struggles she endured and how she and her husband ultimately chose surrogacy.
"Many people in our lives knew that we were expecting but most viewers of MHP Show were not aware of the impending arrival because I was not visibly pregnant," she wrote.
Harris-Perry explained that after her first daughter, Parker, was born she "spent years suffering from the agony of uterine fibroids," and in the end she decided to have a hysterectomy.
"[I]n 2008, after fighting back with an arsenal of homeopathic and medical weapons, I decided to have my uterus removed," she wrote. "I wept for the children I would never have and made peace with the idea that one is enough."
After marrying her husband, James, in 2010, she wrote, she "struggled with accepting that we would never have our own children," but "because I had retained my ovaries, we were able to create our own biological embryos," using in vitro fertillization and a surrogate.
Harris-Perry went on to explain how taxing the process was for all, but in the end, she said, it was all worth it.
"My pregnancy with my first daughter was blessedly uneventful; this one, however, was indeed an event. It took two families, three states, four doctors, and five attorneys to get this little girl here," Harris-Perry wrote. "And while our gestational carrier has no genetic tie to our little one, she is now our family." She also notes that beginning in May, she will pen a monthly column for Essence magazine chronicling her parenting adventures.
Read more at MSNBC.