The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Michelle Obama reveals miscarriage, use of IVF
Ex-first lady details couple’s struggles early in marriage.
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.
Her deeply personal account of her marriage to the future president sheds 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.
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.
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.”
The former first lady said they underwent fertilization treatments to conceive daughters Sasha and Malia, now 17 and 20.
She also writes about falling in love. The Obamas met at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin LLP, and Michelle was skeptical at first. But she was then impressed by his “rich, even sexy baritone” and by his “strange, stirring combination” of serenity and power.
Their first kiss set off a “toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder,” she wrote.
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 her 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 White House, she knew she would be labeled “other” and would have to earn the aura of “grace” given freely to her white predecessors. She found confidence in repeating to herself a favorite chant: “Am I good enough? Yes I am.”
In the memoir, Michelle Obama criticizes President Donald 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.”
Michelle Obama launches her promotional tour Tuesday at Chicago’s United Center.