Yahoo Lifestyle 17 Celebrities Who've Spoken Candidly About Fertility And Struggling To Conceive Children
This post deals with topics like infertility and pregnancy loss.
1.Selena Gomez recently opened up about not being able to carry her own children due to her "medical issues." Selena was diagnosed with lupus in 2013. "I haven’t ever said this...but I unfortunately can’t carry my own children," she told Vanity Fair. "I have a lot of medical issues that would put my life and the baby’s in jeopardy. That was something I had to grieve for a while…"
She spoke a little more about wanting to become a mom one day, and said, "I’m in a much better place with that. I find it a blessing that there are wonderful people willing to do surrogacy or adoption, which are both huge possibilities for me."
She added, "It made me really thankful for the other outlets for people who are dying to be moms. I’m one of those people. I’m excited for what that journey will look like, but it’ll look a little different. At the end of the day, I don’t care. It’ll be mine. It’ll be my baby."
2.Eve spoke about losing her first baby due to an ectopic pregnancy back in 2006. At the time, she was filming her TV series Eve and told people that she was in the hospital because her appendix had burst. "It was 2006, and I was still filming my Eve TV series, when I found out that I was pregnant. It was called a tubal pregnancy, where the embryonic sac ruptured in my one fallopian tube. It's also known as an ectopic pregnancy," she wrote in her book Who's That Girl?
"I had to have emergency surgery and stop filming the show for two weeks. I don't know why I lied to everyone on set and said that my appendix had ruptured, really. Maybe because I was lying to myself. If I faced losing my baby, then I didn't know if two weeks would be enough emotional healing time. In the end, it was barely enough healing time for me physically, before I was right back to work on set," she wrote.
"I had lost so much weight after the surgery, and my body was so frail. I still had to walk red carpets during that time, and when I look back at pictures, I can see how skinny I was. Too skinny. And too much in denial. But it's like I've said before, sometimes I did whatever it took to show up and get the job done ... even if it was to my own detriment," she added. "For years, I never grieved losing my first baby. I didn't know how to, but I eventually learned. I had to speak to that baby and acknowledge their existence. I had to forgive myself and know that what had happened wasn't my fault, that I deserved to be a mother, and that I was ready to bring a baby into this world down here."
3.Rebel Wilson opened up about struggling with fertility in a 2021 Instagram post. "I got some bad news today and didn’t have anyone to share it with...but I guess I gotta tell someone. To all the women out there struggling with fertility, I feel ya," she wrote. "The universe works in mysterious ways, and sometimes it all doesn’t make sense...but I hope there’s light about to shine through all the dark clouds."
Rebel and her partner Ramona Agruma welcomed a baby via surrogate in 2022.
4.Jennifer Aniston opened up about the "challenging road" she faced for many years while trying to get pregnant. "My late 30s, 40s, I'd gone through really hard shit, and if it wasn't for going through that, I would've never become who I was meant to be," she told Allure. "I was trying to get pregnant."
She added that she'd gone through several cycles of IVF that didn't work while being scrutinized by the media. "I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it," she said. "I would've given anything if someone had said to me, 'Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.' You just don't think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed."
At the time, she was hurt by headlines that painted her as "selfish" for not having kids. "The narrative that I was just selfish," she added. "I just cared about my career. And God forbid a woman is successful and doesn't have a child. And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn't give him a kid. It was absolute lies. I don't have anything to hide at this point."
5.Michelle Obama opened up about experiencing a miscarriage when she was in her 30s. "I felt like I failed because I didn't know how common miscarriages were because we don't talk about them," she said on Good Morning America. "We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken." She added that to have her two daughters, Malia and Sasha, she underwent in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
“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 added.
6.Chrissy Teigen opened up about her fertility in a heartfelt Instagram post back in 2021. In the post, she shared about the loss of her baby Jack after 20 weeks of pregnancy. "This is me and my body, just yesterday. Even though I’m no longer pregnant, every glance in the mirror reminds me of what could have been. And I have no idea why I still have this bump, honestly. It’s frustrating," she wrote. "But I’m proud of where this entire journey took my body and mind in other ways. I love being pregnant, so so much, and I’m sad I never will be again. But I am lucky to have two amazing little ones who are transforming into big little people more and more every single day."
In 2023, Chrissy wrote in another post that she wanted to try one more time to get pregnant, so she restarted IVF, the treatment that also helped her get pregnant with her first two children. At the same time, she and her husband, John Legend, had found a perfect surrogate to carry their fourth child.
7.Gabrielle Union spoke candidly about her adenomyosis diagnosis in her book You Got Anything Stronger? She shared that because of it she experienced "eight or nine" miscarriages. At the same time, her now-husband Dwyane Wade was having a baby with another woman, which also had a negative impact on her mental health. "To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience, the experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily while I was unable to, left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind," she wrote.
The experience helped her come to terms with having a baby through surrogacy. "[Dwyane] looked me in the eye. 'As much as we want this baby, I want you,' he said slowly. 'We’ve lost too much in our relationship for me to be okay with encouraging you to do one more thing to your body and your soul,'" she wrote.
8.Halsey has been extremely open about her endometriosis and reproductive health throughout the years, even sharing that she miscarried during a concert. In 2019, Halsey shared that they were considering freezing their eggs because they learned they might be able to carry a child of their own despite their endometriosis. "I was like, 'Wait, what did you just say? Did you just say I can have kids?' It was like the reverse of finding out you have a terminal illness. I called my mom, crying," she said. "Never mind. I don't need to put out a third album. I'm just going to have a baby!"
In the notes of her album Manic, Halsey compares the song "More" to her struggles with fertility. "I've been really open about my struggles with reproductive health, about wanting to freeze my eggs and having endometriosis and things like that," they wrote. "For a long time, I didn't think that having a family was something I was going to be able to do, and it's very, very important to me."
"Then one day my OB-GYN tells me it's looking like I maybe can, and I was so moved. It felt like this ascension into a different kind of womanhood," they added. "All of a sudden, everything is different. I'm not going to go tour myself to death because I have nothing else to do and I'm overcompensating for not being able to have this other thing that I really want. Now, I have a choice. I've never had a choice before."
In 2021, Halsey celebrated the birth of their first child Ender.
9.Nicole Kidman opened up about her struggle with fertility on an episode of 60 Minutes in 2011. "Anyone that’s been in the place of wanting another child or wanting a child knows the disappointment, the pain, and the loss that you go through trying and struggling with fertility," she said. "Fertility is such a big thing, and it’s not something I’ve ever run away from talking about."
While Nicole was married to Tom Cruise, they adopted their children Isabella and Connor. Then, after she got married to Keith Urban, she gave birth to her daughter Sunday Rose. She also spoke about using a gestational surrogate to have their second daughter Faith. "We were in a place of desperately wanting another child," she said. "This opportunity arose for us, and I couldn’t get pregnant…children are children — you’ll die for your children. And when you feel that as a parent—that’s the unconditional love."
10.Kim Kardashian opened up about how difficult it was to get pregnant after giving birth to her first child, North West. "I had so many complications. I had this condition called placenta accreta. There were a couple little operations to fix all that, so that created a little hole in my uterus, which I think made it really tough to get pregnant again," she told C Magazine. "It was a long road. I would go to the doctor in Beverly Hills every day at five in the morning to get tested to see if I was ovulating."
After the birth of her second child, Saint, she used surrogates for her children, Chicago and Psalm.
11.Katie Lee opened up about her fertility experience, saying, "We were trying, I had to have surgery to correct a problem, got an infection, then I was so run down I got shingles. My doctor advised us to try IVF. We just finished the intense process only to get zero healthy embryos. Not only is IVF physically exhausting, the emotional toll is unparalleled. We were filled with hope and excitement only to be crushed."
"I know a family will happen for us, it is just going to be a different journey than we imagined. We will keep working towards it. Someday we will have our happy new beginning and I pray any of you experiencing the same will have yours too," she added.
In 2020, she gave birth to a daughter.
12.Aisha Tyler spoke candidly about her experience with infertility on The Talk. "We went through the process. There are all these shots, they make your body crazy, they make you emotional, they hurt. I was getting shots every day. I wasn’t telling you guys my husband and I were going through this at home together. He hated giving me the shots, he probably cried more than I did," she said. “After going through a lot of procedures and spending a lot of money…the doctor said, ‘Look, based on what we’re seeing here, I just don’t think this is going to happen for you.'"
She added, “The hardest part is I really love my [then-husband Jeff Tietjens] — he’s such a good person and he would be such a great father. But we just decided it wasn’t worth it to go through that and so we decided to stop. It was better to not go through that torture."
13.Jaime King opened up about enduring five miscarriages, five rounds of IVF, and 26 rounds of intrauterine insemination before having her son. “I was hiding what I was going through for so long, and I hear about so many women going through what I went through," she told People. "If I’m open about it, hopefully, it won’t be so taboo to talk about it.”
14.Guiliana Rancic shared that she underwent three IVF cycles and one miscarriage before being diagnosed with breast cancer. Because of her cancer treatment, she was no longer able to carry her frozen eggs. "My first IVF I did get pregnant—that was the miscarriage. But the second one, I did not get pregnant, and that was the biggest kick in the stomach, because I just could not believe you go through so much to get those eggs and put them in, and when the doctor calls you, to hear, 'Oh, sorry, it didn't work.' That was the most shocking," she told CNN in 2012. "I would go, 'I'm a good person, and I could give someone the greatest life of all, but yet I can't get pregnant.'" She used a surrogate to carry her son, who was born in 2012.
15.Angela Bassett said that she had been through fertility treatments for seven years. "It was difficult, it was challenging. It was not happening. Or it would happen and then it would poof — it would go away. It was really rough," she told Oprah Winfrey. She welcomed fraternal twins, Bronwyn and Slater, via surrogate in 2006.
16.Nia Vardolos spoke about her struggles with getting pregnant and said, "It was a sad process for me to become a mom, and a long process. I felt so embarrassed that I couldn't have a biological child." After going through fertility treatments for nine years, she and her husband adopted their daughter in 2008. "She turned and looked at me, and my first thought was, 'Oh, I found you.’ That’s it," she told People.
17.Finally, Anne Hathaway has been open about her struggles with infertility over the years and recently spoke candidly about her miscarriage and how it affected her mental health. "The first time, it didn't work out for me. I was doing a play, and I had to give birth onstage every night," she explained that she came offstage one night and told her friends she miscarried. "It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong," she added.
She also explained that she felt obligated to share her story so that other women wouldn't feel so alone. "I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That's where we take on damage. So I decided that I was going to talk about it. The thing that broke my heart, blew my mind, and gave me hope was that for three years after, almost daily, a woman came up to me in tears and I would just hold her, because she was carrying this [pain] around and suddenly it wasn't all hers anymore," she said.
