Anderson Cooper Announces Birth of Second Son, Reveals Name Live On-Air

Anderson Cooper is now a father of two! The CNN anchor announced while on-air on Thursday night that he had welcomed his second son, Sebastian Luke Maisani-Cooper, via surrogate. Sebastian is the little brother to Cooper’s 21-month-old son, Wyatt Morgan. Cooper co-parents both boys with his former partner, nightclub owner Benjamin Maisani, from whom he split in 2018 after nine years of dating. The two remain good friends.

Cooper expressed a desire for more children in a September interview with PEOPLE. “Would I want to have more kids? I would, definitely,” he said. “It would certainly be nice for Wyatt to have a sibling. Yeah, it would be.”

Right after Wyatt’s birth, Cooper told PEOPLE that becoming a father was a lifelong dream. “When I was 12 years old and knew I was gay and thought about my life, it always upset me because I thought, ‘I will never be able to have a kid,’” he said. “This is a dream come true.”

“It feels like my life has actually begun,” Cooper continued. “And I sort of wonder, what was I waiting for? This is a new level of love. It’s unlike anything I’ve experienced, and yet it’s also very familiar and incredibly special and intimate. It’s really extraordinary.”

Cooper made the decision to co-parent with Maisani despite breaking up two years before the birth of their first son. “I don’t really have a family and so my friends have become my family. This is somebody I was involved with for 10 years,” he explained in an interview with Howard Stern last May. “He’s a great guy. We didn’t work out as a couple, but I want somebody — when I was a little kid, it was just my mom and my brother. My mom was not the most parental person and I wished some adult, after my dad died, had stepped in and been like, ‘You know what? I’ll take you to a ballgame.’ Or, ‘Let’s go out to lunch every now and ten and just talk.’”