Hollywood starlet Jamie Chung, 39, surprised her fans last year when she and her husband announced the birth of twins. It subsequently emerged that their children arrived with the help of a surrogate mother.

She explained her reasons in a candid interview with Today Parents:

“I was terrified of becoming pregnant. I was terrified of putting my life on hold for two-plus years. 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.”

She went on to say:

“People probably think, ‘Oh, she’s so vain. She didn’t want to get pregnant,’ and it’s much more complicated than that. 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.”

Chung’s break-through was MTV’s “The Real World: San Diego.” She has since starred in a number of movies and TV series, including “Lovecraft Country” and “Dexter: New Blood.”

Washington Post journalist Alyssa Rosenberg tried to write a column about Chung’s decision – but discovered that she had very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, she praised her honesty and was delighted to hear “a woman bluntly rage against the limits of biology and the costs it imposes on half the population”. On the other hand, she mused, using another woman’s body sounds a lot like exploitation. “One doesn’t have to be that unsympathetic to feel a twinge of moral unease about surrogacy.”