Michelle Obama’s IVF journey

Former First Lady Michelle Obama has opened up about her struggle with fertility, revealing that the couple’s two daughters, Sasha and Malia, were conceived using IVF.

In her newly released memoir Belonging, Michelle Obama also documents her feelings of being “lost and alone” after suffering a miscarriage 20 years ago.

She and her husband Barack Obama had undergone IVF after unsuccessfully trying to fall pregnant naturally, only to have that pregnancy end in heartache.

“We were trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going well,” Mrs Obama, now 54, writes.

“We had one pregnancy test come back positive, which caused us both to forget every worry and swoon with joy, but a couple of weeks later I had a miscarriage, which left me physically uncomfortable and cratered any optimism we felt.”

With her husband’s political career requiring him to often be away from home, Michelle Obama writes that she was sometimes left to administer the injections, necessary for IVF, herself.

She writes that she was left “largely on my own to manipulate my reproductive system into peak efficiency.”

The former first lady is being applauded for writing so candidly about her experiences, which many women undergoing IVF can relate to.

“I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were because we don’t talk about them,” she said in an interview on Good Morning America.

“We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *