Michelle Obama has recalled the painful memory of struggling to conceive before the birth of her daughters with husband, former U.S. President Barack Obama.
The Obamas welcomed Malia in 1998 and Sasha in 2001, and as the former First Lady recounted in her 2018 memoir, Becoming, she had a miscarriage roughly two years before she gave birth to Malia.
On a recent live episode of her podcast IMO, the former First Lady spoke to businesswoman and retired tennis player Serena Williams about motherhood and reflected on her pregnancy journey.
Around the 4:00 mark of the video, Michelle called her miscarriage "devastating" and recalled opting for IVF to later give birth to her daughters.
Williams, who also shares two daughters with her husband Alexis Ohanian, Olympia, eight, and Adira, two, froze her eggs in her twenties before deciding to conceive.
"I don't know about all of you, but I know that when I struggled to conceive, I took that on, like a personal failure," Michelle continued around the 7:20 mark.
This led Williams to add that she's grown to have open conversations about "uncomfortable" topics like fertility issues and "making them comfortable."
In Becoming, Michelle Obama recalled that when she and her husband tried to conceive before IVF entered the picture, it "wasn’t going well for them."
"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," she wrote (per PBS).
