Maria Menounos welcomes first baby via surrogate

After a 10-year struggle with infertility, compounded by cancer surgery and treatments for a brain tumor and later a pancreatic tumor, TV personality Maria Menounos and her producer husband Keven Undergaro have welcomed a daughter via surrogate.

“It was the most special moment of my life,” former E! News anchor Menounos, 45, told Us Weekly in a story posted Wednesday, almost a month after the June 23 birth of Athena Alexandra. Added Undergaro, who is in his mid-50s: “It was like Christmas morning times a million.”

Their daughter was born in Milwaukee, where the surrogate and her family live. Menounos and Undergaro had arrived there near the due date, Menounos recalled, and “driving the surrogate to the doctor’s appointments and having dinner with her family.” They booked a room for the surrogate at their hotel “so she’d be closer to the hospital. So we got to the hotel, and it happened that night! She and I were in my room just chatting, and I showed her all of Athena’s stuff and her clothes and I just started bawling about how I’ve been waiting for [the baby]. … So she left the room, and her contractions started at two in the morning.”

The couple had undergone multiple unsuccessful rounds of in vitro fertilization and had a previous surrogate in 2020 who did not work out. Menounos said she was feeling doubtful, but then saw a welcome sign.

“Two days before we implanted, Keven and I were sitting outside,” she told the magazine, ‘and I said to him, ‘It’s do or die; [the surrogate and her husband are] flying in [to Los Angeles from Wisconsin]. We are going to implant these embryos. If we don’t think this is right for us, we have to make a decision now.’ All of a sudden I hear rustling, and a huge stork” — a traditional folk symbol of impending parenthood — "flies out of this tree across the street. I have,” she exclaimed, "the [expletive] video!”