Jimmy Fallon’s daughter Winnie Rose, born last month, was carried by a surrogate.

The Irish American talk show host and his wife Nancy Juvonen revealed that two weeks after the birth of the baby, and felicitations have flowed since their announcement.

Fallon told Today’s Savannah Guthrie on Friday:  “It wasn’t really a secret, but my wife and I had been trying for a while to have a baby. We’ve tried a bunch of different things. So we had a surrogate.”

Most of Fallon’s colleagues didn’t even know he was expecting a baby - his wife didn’t look pregnant, after all.

“We said, ‘We’re not going to tell anybody’,” Fallon said. “It’d be just more fun if it’s just private between me and my wife. And then we get to introduce her to everybody.”

Although one in six couples faces problems conceiving, many still feel funny telling others that they are undergoing treatment. In fact, infertility is one of the last great cultural taboos. One survey of infertile couples conducted by the pharmaceutical companies Schering-Plough and Merck found that 61 per cent hid their infertility from family and friends, and half didn’t share it with their mothers.

 Sarah Elizabeth Richards, writing in Time, asked why the secrecy?

She wrote: “Fallon’s openness came as a surprise, considering that most celebrities have been notoriously mum on the subject. Who can blame them? Remember all the rampant speculating about whether Kate Middleton had infertility problems? And — gasp! — was Baby George conceived via IVF?”

Richards, author of “Motherhood, Rescheduled: The New Frontier of Egg Freezing and the Women Who Tried It”, wrote: “We should applaud Fallon - along with his wife and other high-profile women willing to share their stories - for going public with facts so many would prefer to keep hidden.

“While celebrities take a lot of flak for exposing their private lives, these are important gestures of support to all the families who are suffering in silence. Such honesty is also welcomed by fertility doctors who struggle to educate patients about the challenges of getting pregnant in your 40s, when popular culture makes it look so easy.”