Naomi Campbell has announced the birth of her second child and the internet is clamboring for details. “How?” people are asking. Over and over… and over.
Let’s rewind for a second. London-born supermodel Naomi had her first child, a daughter, at 50. This was a couple of years ago, and the only detail she shared at the time, in an interview with British Vogue, was that she had not adopted and the baby was biologically hers. No further information on how she’d become a mother was offered, and in addition to that, two years later she’s kept her name private and has shared only a handful of photos, all of which obscure or cover her daughter’s face.
What we’re meant to glean from this is clear: Naomi doesn’t want this part of her life to be fodder for public consumption, to be gossiped about and picked over.
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This week, she has announced on Instagram the birth of a second child, sharing that he is a boy and adding “It’s never too late to become a mother”. The speculation has begun again. “Did she disguise a pregnancy? Did she use IVF? Did she hire a surrogate? Was the surrogate from the UK or the US? Does she realise she’s 53!?”, were all questions that flew in thick and fast on social media.
“It's really the hardest thing.”
The answers to the questions, and these details, are none of our business. It might be a popular opinion that becoming famous means you have automatically signed up to invasive judgements for life, but it doesn’t mean it’s the right one. There are few things, if any, more intimate than conceiving, bearing or welcoming children. Naomi made it clear with her first child that she doesn’t want the public in this part of her life. Pre-empting their thirst for information, she gave out the bits she could bear. Then she put down unambiguous barriers, stuck to them, and asked us to back off. How disrespectful to disregard these all over again. She might be a celebrity, she might be rich, but with or without these facets, she is also a woman.
How she had her children isn’t for us to speculate over, and neither is her age. She is clearly aware of the aspersions cast on her, given the phrasing of her most recent announcement, and in what she told French magazine Madame Figaro last year: “I am aware of the looks, sometimes hostile, that people have on me. But I don't care. I wanted to be a mother.”
Who are we to tell her that she mustn't, because she’s ‘too old’? To say Naomi shouldn’t be a mother in her early 50s, as she is now, is to say no one in that age bracket should. Not the woman in your office who spent two decades trying to get pregnant, not your friend from primary school who has decided to focus on her career or education first. Whether we mean them too or not, our views on people like Naomi reflect our views on our friends, colleagues and loved ones, and on ourselves. Demanding these details is the celeb equivalent of asking a new mother “So! When are you having more?”. Society is slowly accepting how invasive and unacceptable this is. Our treatment of public figures, and their own attempts to become mothers and fathers, needs to catch up.
The top name is back for the sixth time….
Finally, and crucially, we don’t actually know Naomi used a surrogate to carry her newborn son. Given the privacy she’s demonstrated around her firstborn, I'm not sure we ever will. So placing her at the centre of surrogacy discussions that are also circulating online is wildly disrespectful. I’m aware that some believe that certain forms of surrogacy are wrong, an act of a richer woman hiring the body of a poorer woman. Undoubtedly, the surrogacy industry is a complex one, and there are stark differences between how it works in the UK in comparison to the US. Here, surrogates can only be paid expenses: there they can be paid a fee. As for the discussion around the ethics of surrogacy, I think author Roxane Gay phrased it well on Twitter earlier this week, when she said “People’s bodies shouldn’t be treated like they’re for sale, but in consensual surrogacy without exploitation or pressure, compensation is very appropriate.”
If this all boils down to a discussion of the value of women's bodies and minds, how can anyone simultaneously believe women’s bodies shouldn’t be for hire but should be a carriage for their world views? How can anyone believe that the wishes of a 50-something women are worth less than those of a 30-something?
Naomi has told us she wanted to be a mother, and she’s become one. In a world that is so often bleak and painful, can we just stop for a second and realise how utterly wonderful is that?
