Khloé Kardashian has revealed that she struggled to bond with the baby she procured via surrogacy. Having paid someone else to gestate for her, the reality TV star reports that “I definitely buried my head in the sand during that pregnancy” and “didn’t digest what was happening”.

The segment in the latest series of The Kardashians sees Khloé acknowledge that in effect she bought a baby, calling it “such a transactional experience”. And, centrally, that none of this was in the baby’s interests: “it is not about him”.

She tacitly acknowledges the harm this does, saying, “I felt really guilty that this woman just had my baby and I take the baby and go to another room and you are separated”.

Writing for unHerd, Mary Harrington says her choice of phrase is telling: there was a “you” — a mother-baby dyad that did not include her, and that had to be destroyed in order for the baby to become “my baby”.

But while this might have been transactional, Kardashian says, “it doesn’t mean it is bad or good. It is just very different.”

Harrington disagrees: “Surrogacy bakes mother-loss into a baby’s earliest experience — and inflicts this loss on a profoundly vulnerable infant, in the name of adult desire. Parents have a duty to put their children’s needs first. This is an inexcusable inversion of that duty”.