Obama had miscarriage, requiring fertility drugs
First lady’s memoir recounts pregnancy trials, criticizes Trump’s ‘bigotry and xenophobia’ Trump insults reporters, claims Acosta video wasn’t doctored
WASHINGTON — 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.”
Expensive treatments
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,” 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 NEW YORK — Before hopping on a plane to Paris on Friday, President Donald Trump insulted more reporters, threatened that others may have their White House credentials pulled like CNN’s Jim Acosta and disputed reports that his press secretary spread a 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.
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 best-sellers 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.
“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.”
Mrs. Obama, said they underwent doctored video of Acosta’s encounter with a White House intern.
During a brief media availability outside the White House, the president gave more fodder to fans who enjoy watching him scrap with journalists.
Trump said “nobody manipulated” a video distributed by White House press secretary Sarah Sanders that showed Acosta resisting an intern’s attempt to take a microphone from him during a news conference on Friday. A video expert had told the Associated Press that the video appeared doctored to speed up Acosta’s arm movement and make his gesture more threatening; the White House used that encounter to justify pulling Acosta’s credentials.
While Trump called the reporter who asked about the video “dishonest,” that was mild compared to his treatment of April Ryan, a White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks, and CNN’s Abby Phillip.
Phillip asked Trump fertilization treatments to conceive daughters Sasha and Malia, now 17 and 20.
Fear for her girls
In the memoir, 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.
“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.”
As he left for Paris on 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.”
Michelle Obama also expresses disbelief over how so many women would choose a “misogynist” over Clinton in 2016. She remembers how her body “buzzed with fury” after seeing the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. whether he wanted Matt Whitaker, the newly appointed acting attorney general, to rein in special counsel Robert Mueller.
“What a stupid question you asked,” Trump replied.
CNN said via Twitter that Phillip’s question wasn’t stupid. “In fact, she asked the most pertinent question of the day,” CNN said. Trump’s insults “are nothing new. And never surprising,” CNN said.
The attack on Ryan was unprovoked, although the president had appeared upset at Wednesday’s news conference when Ryan stood up and asked him, without a microphone, about voter suppression in the midterm elections.