Michelle Obama reveals IVF experience in memoir
WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama says she felt “lost and alone” after suffering a miscarriage 20 years ago and she and Barack Obama underwent in vitro fertilization to conceive their two daughters.
“We were trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going well,” Obama, 54, writes in her memoir, which comes out today. “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.”
The Associated Press purchased an early copy of Becoming, one of the most avidly anticipated political books in recent memory. In it, she writes of being alone to administer herself shots to help hasten the process. Her “sweet, attentive husband” was at the state legislature.
Obama’s family revelations are some of many included in the book from a former first lady who has offered few extensive comments on her White House years.
IVF is one form of assisted reproduction and typically involves removing eggs from a woman, fertilizing them with sperm in a lab, and implanting a resulting embryo into the woman’s uterus. It costs thousands of dollars for every “cycle,” and many couples require more than one attempt.
“I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were because we don’t talk about them,” the former first lady said in an interview broadcast Friday on ABC’s Good Morning America. ”We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken.”
Obama said she underwent fertilization treatments to conceive daughters Sasha and Malia, now 17 and 20.
In the memoir, Obama also writes about everything from growing up in Chicago to confronting racism in public life and becoming the country’s first black first lady. She also lets loose a blast of anger at U.S. President Donald Trump.
She writes in the memoir that Trump’s questioning of whether her husband was an American citizen was “crazy and meanspirited … its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”
“What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls?” she writes in the memoir. “Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.”
Trump suggested Obama was not born in the U.S. but on foreign soil — his father was Kenyan. The former president was born in Hawaii.
Obama launches her promotional tour today at Chicago’s United Center, where tens of thousands of people have purchased tickets — from just under $30 US to thousands of dollars — to attend the event moderated by Oprah Winfrey.