When she won this year’s Oscars for her role as Evelyn Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Michelle Yeoh dedicated her award to mothers all over the world: “I have to dedicate this to my mum, all the mums in the world, because they are really the superheroes, and without them none of us would be here tonight”.

Yeoh never had biological kids of her own. When she was 28, she stepped away from an active and successful acting career to become a wife and mother. But after many IVF attempts, Yeoh discovered she could not have children of her own. “I tried IVF... everything. I was desperate. I love kids and saw myself surrounded by them but there’s only so much you can put your body and mind through,” she said in a 2018 interview with You magazine. A discovery that ultimately prompted Yeoh to end her marriage to Hong Kong entrepreneur Dickson Poon.

However, Yeoh did get to be step-mum to Nicolas Todt, the son of her long-term partner and French motor racing executive, Jean Todt. Nicholas has since then made her an even prouder step-grandmother when he welcomed his daughter Raelyn—who is all over “Popo Michelle’s” social media. 

Ashley Graham is known for breaking boundaries in the fashion industry, challenging conventional beauty standards and advocating for body diversity. As a plus-size model, she’s always been brutally honest about these subjects and willing to share her vulnerability with her Instagram followers—but especially following the birth of her children. And her honesty has normalised vulnerability and the idea that loving and being kind to ourselves isn’t an easy or a linear journey.

“Like so many women, what I went through with childbirth has reshaped my relationship with my body,” she told Glamour in 2022. “I say this knowing that I am the person who has been shouting from the rooftops to you all: ‘Love the skin you’re in’. Yet, for me, the births of all my three children threw a lot of that out of the window.” And sometimes it takes a minute to learn to appreciate ourselves again, which Graham did after reflecting on her rollercoaster journey: “I am bold, I am brilliant, I am beautiful... we all are," she added.

Back in 2020, Chrissy Teigen shared with her 40 million followers on Instagram her painful decision to abort her pregnancy at 20 weeks following medical complications. At the time, she and her husband, American singer-songwriter John Legend, perceived the traumatic event as a miscarriage. “We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before,” Teigen wrote in her caption, which swiftly prompted a conversation about miscarriages.

Two years later, against the backdrop of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Roe vs Wade ruling—which protects a pregnant person’s right to have an abortion—Teigen shared that she and Legend had evolved their understanding of their 2020 decision, and realised that rather than a miscarriage, what she’d experienced was in fact a needed abortion. Something that is now much more restricted or even illegal for many women living in certain US states.

Before her Netflix hits Always Be My Maybe (2019) and Beef (2023), Ali Wong had already earnt massive success with her two comedy specials, Baby Cobra (2016) and Hard Knock Wife (2018). In both specials she was pregnant and dedicated much of the shows to being unfiltered about her pregnancy hardships, the physical toll and trauma that carrying and birthing a baby can leave on a woman’s body, and why maternity leave is so essential for recovery.

Also, Wong has opened up about her miscarriage and embracing her body after a C-section in a 2020 interview with Health. “[The scar] bummed me out for a while, until one day, I was like: it is what it is. I got two beautiful girls out of it.” 

During season one of Netflix’s Bling Empire, Christine Chiu revealed that she and her husband, Dr Gabriel Chiu, had gone through several rounds of IVF treatment to have their son, affectionally dubbed Baby G on the show.

“I had held it in for so long and that wasn’t great for my mental health,” Chiu told Tudum, Netflix’s official companion site, last year. “There’s so much power in sharing our journeys and being there to support each other and talking it through. That was something I didn’t have when I was going through it. There were less than a handful of people [to] whom I could disclose [these] difficulties, and it became a very lonely—unnecessarily lonely—journey.”

Chiu had also shared on the show the pressure she’d felt to have a son due to expectations from her husband’s family, and revealed she’s felt inadequate in her in-law’s eyes when she couldn’t get pregnant naturally. Also, that she was helping him conceal the truth from them that it was actually their son, Dr Chiu, who had infertility issues and not her in order to preserve his reputation. And her honesty has had a ripple effect. In a 2021 interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Chui said that “so many Asian women have reached out and said, ‘Thank you so much for sharing that part of your story, because I am, too, covering up for my husband’”.

In January 2022, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Nick Jonas announced the birth of their daughter, Malti Marie, but were criticised by some for choosing to have their baby via surrogate. Accused of “wanting to preserve her body”, the Indian actress was forced to explain in different interviews that surrogacy was necessary due to medical complications.   

Chopra Jonas was previously very open about anxiety she felt that was linked to her “biological clock”, and explained in a 2023 episode of the Armchair Expert podcast that she had had a procedure to extract and freeze her eggs when she was in her early 30s. 

Being a parenting unit with a partner is a tough gig, and it’s even tougher when someone has to take on the role as a single parent. And that is exactly what Ezurin Khyra, the former Malaysian princess and model, is to her five children. 

The ex-wife of royal Tunku Dato’ Yaacob Khyra of Malaysia, and star of the reality TV show The House, Khyra and the father of her children remain a solid parenting team, and she a role model for how to be a single mum to kids with divorced parents. Because by being on good terms with her ex-husband, she is not creating tension or anxiety within her children over which parent to “choose”. Indeed, she shared on her show that she is prioritising the wellbeing of her children by showing them how to put differences aside: “When you raise children, mental health is important—especially when you’re divorced”.

Angelina Jolie, as a divorced mother of six children, three of them adopted, had been redefining motherhood since she adopted her eldest son Maddox from Cambodia back in 2002, when she was married to US actor Billy Bob Thornton. Following their 2003 divorce, Jolie quickly pivoted to raising him as a single parent. 

Maddox was followed by Zahara, who was adopted from Ethiopie in 2005, and Pax, who was adopted from Vietnam in 2007. Jolie also welcomed three biological children with ex-husband Brad Pitt: Shiloh in 2006, and twins Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline in 2008. Throughout her motherhood journey, Jolie has shared in different interviews what she considered important in her parenting style, including honouring and learning from her adopted children’s cultural roots, and being transparent about the adoption process.

Malaysian actress Yeo Yann Yann, who’s known for her roles in films such as Wet Season (2019) and Ilo Ilo (2013), and who will soon star in American Born Chinese on Disney+, opened up about her struggles with postpartum depression after giving birth to her daughter Vera in 2012: “I realised that I needed help when I thought of ending my life after an argument with my husband [Hong Kong action director Ma Yuk Sing],” she revealed in an episode of Quan Yi Fong’s podcast Hear U Out. “None of my friends knew about my depression because I felt like nobody would be able to help me,” she added. 

It is not unusual within Asian cultures to not talk about depression as it is still very much stigmatised and people are often advised to sweep negativity under the rug. To fight against that mentality and to normalise the discussion surrounding mental health, Yeo shared that she sought help from doctors turned to traditional Chinese medicine and jogging to help improve her mental state.