What Michelle Obama Has Said About Her Tragic Pregnancy Loss
While the Obamas have always been an open book, it wasn't until they were out of the White House that they finally decided to reveal some of the secrets they kept hidden during Barack's presidency. One of them was the great lengths they went to grow their family and how a miscarriage left them feeling utterly defeated.
Barack and Michelle Obama may seem like the perfect parents to Malia and Sasha now, but it actually took them a while to get there. As a career-focused couple, they didn't rush into having kids right away. "We had this nice stretch of about three years where she was doing her thing in her career, and I was doing mine," Barack said in an episode of "Renegades: Born in the USA" podcast with Bruce Springsteen. "Then we started trying to have kids. Took a while. Michelle had a couple of miscarriages, and we had to kind of work at it." By the time they welcomed their first child, they had been married for over half a decade, so they were already primed to become parents. "There had been this six-year stretch in which probably for about half of it, we had been trying, so there was no surprise to it," the former president added.
While Barack went light on the details of their fertility struggles, Michelle painted a more harrowing picture in her memoir. In the book, she revealed that after suffering a devastating pregnancy loss, she had to go through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive her daughters.
Michelle's miscarriage gave her feelings of 'inadequacy'
Michelle and Barack Obama's path to parenthood was fraught with challenges, as their careers often kept them apart. Barack was elected into the senate, and Michelle was promoted to associate dean at the University of Chicago. "Our attempts at procreation took place not in service of important monthly hormonal markers but rather in concert with the Illinois legislative schedule. This, I figured, was one thing we could try to fix," Michelle wrote in her bestselling "Becoming" memoir. But even with making "adjustments," including Barack racing home late at night just to make it in time for her ovulation window, their initial efforts were rendered futile.
Eventually, the stick turned blue, but the initial joy of a positive pregnancy test was soon overshadowed by the despair of a miscarriage. It "left me physically uncomfortable and cratered any optimism we felt," she detailed, adding that the pregnancy loss was "lonely, painful, and demoralizing" and caused her to blame herself. "Seeing women and their children walking happily along a street, I'd feel a pang of longing followed by a bruising wallop of inadequacy," she penned.
Even after the couple had decided to resort to IVF, she had to bear some of the burden alone, especially when Barack's work commitments took him away. She was forced to self-administer hormonal injections and become "largely on my own to manipulate my reproductive system into peak efficiency." This experience led her to realize the "acute burden of being female" and even harbor a resentment towards politics altogether.
She opened up about her struggles to help other women facing the same thing
Michelle Obama's candidness about her fertility challenges brought much-needed attention to a topic often shrouded in stigma. "I felt like I failed because I didn't know how common miscarriages were because we don't talk about them," she shared on "Good Morning America." The former first lady added, "We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we're broken."
In an effort to steer the conversation in the right direction, Michelle decided to share her story to help make everyone realize that miscarriage is "a normal biological hiccup," she wrote, "a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out." She also noted in her GMA interview that there is a need for more openness and honesty about women's reproductive health. "I think it's the worst thing that we do to each other as women, not share the truth about our bodies and how they work," she said. "That's one of the reasons why I think it's important to talk to young mothers about the fact that miscarriages happen."
As a result, there was a huge increase in black women opting for fertility treatments, which experts call the "Michelle Obama effect." Barbara Collura, president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association, told ABC: "There is a whole long list of celebrities who have shared something about their infertility but this was different. ... When Michelle Obama spoke out it was like earth-shattering. It was a very big deal."