Michelle Obama talks about miscarriage, anger at Trump in memoir
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” — dangerous, deliberate rhetoric, she wrote, that risked her family’s safety.
“For this,” she writes, “I’d never forgive him.”
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. The Associated Press purchased an early copy. “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.