After welcoming their twin boys late last year, “Dexter: New Blood” star Jamie Chung has revealed why she and her husband, actor Bryan Greenberg, decided on surrogacy.
Chung, 39, opened up about their decision to use a surrogate to deliver their twins to Today Parents, describing her acting career as a major factor.
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“I was terrified of becoming pregnant. I was terrified of putting my life on hold for two-plus years,” she said. “In my industry, it feels like you’re easily forgotten if you don’t work within the next month of your last job. Things are so quickly paced in what we do. So it’s a compromise that we made together as a couple.”
“People probably think, ‘Oh, she’s so vain. She didn’t want to get pregnant,’ and it’s much more complicated than that,” Chung added. “For me, personally, and I will leave it at this, it’s like, I worked my ass off my entire life to get where I am. I don’t want to lose opportunities. I don’t want to be resentful.”
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Chung and Greenberg, 44, welcomed their twins in October 2021. Although Chung shared her experience with freezing her eggs in 2019, she kept the pregnancy private over the fear of being judged, as the stigma surrounding surrogacy is still pervasive in today’s society.
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“I think there’s a little bit of shame. It’s still not a very common thing and we weren’t ready for judgment,” Chung explained. “We really just did it to protect ourselves. We announced things when we were ready to.”
Congress passed a law that protects pregnant women from losing their jobs in 1978 called the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. Despite this, soap opera star Hunter Tylo sued her employer Spelling Entertainment Group after she was purportedly fired for being pregnant in 1996.
Chung is currently promoting Duracell’s #PowerSafely campaign in partnership with Duracell to help reduce the risk of accidental ingestion of lithium coin batteries.
“My number one priority is to keep my kids safe,” Chung said. “If a kid swallows a battery, it could be catastrophic.”
Image @jamiejchung
