Michelle Obama had miscarriage, used IVF to conceive two daughters
Michelle Obama says she felt alone after a miscarriage 20 years ago and she and Barack Obama underwent fertility treatments to conceive their two daughters, according to her upcoming memoir.
In some of her most extensive public comments on her White House years, the former first lady also lets her fury fly over President Donald Trump’s “bigotry and xenophobia” — rhetoric, she wrote, that was “deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”
But it’s her deeply personal account of her marriage to the future president that shed new light on the Ivy League-educated couple’s early struggle with issues of family, ambition and public life.
“We were trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going well,” Mrs. Obama, 54, writes in “Becoming,” set for release Tuesday. “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 Obamas opted for IVF, one form of assisted reproduction that typically involves removing eggs from a woman, fertilizing them with sperm in a lab, and implanting the resulting embryo. It costs thousands of dollars for every “cycle,” and many couples require more than one attempt.
Mrs. Obama writes of being alone to administer herself shots to help hasten the process. Her “sweet, attentive husband” was at the state legislature, “leaving me largely on my own to manipulate my reproductive system into peak efficiency,” she said.
“Becoming” is one of the most anticipated political books in memory, ranking at the top of Amazon’s bestsellers on Friday. That’s often the case with the memoirs of former first ladies, including Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush. But Mrs. Obama defied her exalted status in the annals of history by cultivating an image of a modern woman with whom many Americans would like to sip wine and chat.
But until now, she’s not extensively shared so many details. Some family struggles, such as losing a baby, are known by millions of women.
Mrs. Obama, said they underwent fertilization treatments to conceive daughters Sasha and Malia, now 17 and 20.
Confronting racism in public life — being the first black first lady, wife of the nation’s first black president — has been a bracing experience, in Mrs. Obama’s telling. She agonized over what she feared was a cartoonish, racist image. She remembered being labeled “angry” and, by the Fox network, “Obama’s Baby Mama.”
In the memoir, Mrs. Obama lets loose a blast of anger at Trump.
She writes that Trump’s questioning of whether her husband was an American citizen was “crazy and mean-spirited” — and “dangerous.” 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.
As he left for Paris Friday, Trump chose not to respond to the former first lady, telling reporters, “Oh, I guess she wrote a book. She got paid a lot of money to write a book and they always insisted you come up with controversial.” Trump instead changed the subject to his predecessor, Barack Obama, saying, “I’ll never forgive him” for making the country “very unsafe.”