Priyanka Chopra Jonas explains why she’s so protective of her daughter (Picture: Zoë Ghertner/British Vogue)
Priyanka Chopra Jonas has shut down criticism over using a surrogate following an emotional first year of her young daughter’s life.
The Indian actress and Jonas Brother Nick welcomed their baby girl last January.
However, it was touch-and-go for a while, as little Malti Marie spent over three months in hospital after being born a full trimester before her due date, and only returned home in late May.
Opening up on the ordeal, Priyanka revealed her daughter was ‘smaller than my hand.’
‘I saw what the intensive-care nurses do. They do God’s work,’ she said.
‘Nick and I were both standing there as they intubated her. I don’t know how they even found what they needed [in her tiny body] to intubate her.’
The Hollywood star didn’t know if her one-year-old was going to survive after being born prematurely (Picture: Zoë Ghertner/British Vogue)
For the next three months, the new parents had to shuttle daily to the neonatal intensive care unit during the first omicron wave in the US.
‘We spent every single day with her on my chest, on my husband’s chest,’ she added tenderly in an interview for British Vogue’s February 2023 issue.
‘I didn’t know if she would make it or not.’
Alongside worrying about her daughter’s health for the past year, movie star Priyanka has also faced intense speculation around her reason for using a surrogate.
She and husband Nick Jonas want to keep their daughter out of the limelight (Picture: Amy Sussman/Getty Images)
While she prefers to keep private the specific circumstances that led her and her husband to surrogacy, she shared: ‘I had medical complications.
‘So this was a necessary step, and I’m so grateful I was in a position where I could do this.’
Praising the couple’s surrogate, she said: ‘Our surrogate was so generous, kind, lovely and funny, and she took care of this precious gift for us for six months.’
For the internet trolls who made a sport of theorising why the couple enlisted a surrogate, though, Priyanka has some strong words.
Malti Marie was born via a surrogate in January 2022 (Picture: Instagram)
‘You don’t know me,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what I’ve been through. And just because I don’t want to make my medical history, or my daughter’s, public doesn’t give you the right to make up whatever the reasons were.’
The Miss World 2020 winner also said it’s ‘so painful’ to have people talk about her one-year-old, urging gossipers to ‘keep her out of it.’
‘I’ve developed a tough hide when people talk about me,’ she said, a little rattled. ‘But it’s so painful when they talk about my daughter. I’m like, “Keep her out of it.”
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‘I know what it felt like to hold her little hands when they were trying to find her veins. So no, she’s not going to be gossip.’
Priyanka has so far been ‘really protective’ of her daughter, and it seems she plans to keep things that way.
‘It’s not about my life only. It’s hers too.’
The February issue of British Vogue is available on newsstands and via digital download from Tuesday 24th January.
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‘I didn’t know if she would make it or not.’
