Priyanka Chopra Opens Up About Terrifying NICU Experience & Choosing Surrogacy With Nick Jonas

In a new interview with British Vogue, Priyanka Chopra Jonas shared she has a fear that her daughter, who’s just started eating solid foods, will choke on something when she’s eating. And if you know even a little bit about what the 40-year-old actress and husband Nick Jonas have gone through together as new parents, you’d 100% understand where she’s coming from.

Chopra got intimately real about the terrors of being a parent to a very premature new baby in the interview, recalling how she and the singer spent three months in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) after their daughter, Malti, who arrived via surrogate, was born a whole trimester early.

“I was in the [operating room] when she came out,” the actress, whose songs “Exotic” and “I Can’t Make You Love Me” charted on the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs tally, recalled to the magazine. “She was so small, smaller than my hand. I saw what the intensive-care nurses do. They do God’s work. 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.”

“We spent every single day with her on my chest, on my husband’s chest,” she added. “I didn’t know if she would make it or not.” 

Chopra also shared a little insight into their decision to welcome a baby via surrogate, something she and her husband have largely kept private. “I had medical complications,” she explained, calling surrogacy “a necessary step.”

“I’m so grateful I was in a position where I could do this,” she said. “Our surrogate was so generous, kind, lovely and funny, and she took care of this precious gift for us for six months.”

The couple’s decision to choose surrogacy did not escape public scrutiny, much of which involved cruel assumptions about Chopra. For instance, as reported by British Vogue, some people speculated that the Bollywood-turned-Hollywood star had deliberately passed over traditional pregnancy out of vanity.

“You don’t know me,” Chopra said when asked about how she responds to those types of remarks. “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.” 

Popping in and out throughout the interview was Jonas, who told the publication that there’s “nothing better” than fatherhood. According to Chopra, he’s the mature one in the relationship and always keeps her grounded.

“He’s a wise man beyond his years,” she said of the 30-year-old musician. “I get affirmations from him all the time, to remind me of my value when I forget or when I get insecure. He just sees through the fog for me. He sees the best in people.”