Hayden Panettiere wrote it plainly: “I felt nothing” when she first saw her daughter Kaya, in December 2014, after a birth that nearly cost her life.
Seven transfusions, a second surgery, and postpartum depression that led her, months later, to give custody of the girl to Wladimir Klitschko.
Some say it was an act of brutal honesty, proof that maternal instinct does not always arrive with childbirth and that talking about it saves lives.
Others believe that every mother should fight before giving up, no matter how much it hurts.
Was it courage to admit that she did not feel that connection, or should she have tried harder before letting her daughter go?