Michelle Obama says she felt lost and alone after suffering a miscarriage 20 years ago and later undergoing in vitro fertilisation to conceive her two
Michelle Obama says she felt lost and alone after suffering a miscarriage 20 years ago and later undergoing in vitro fertilisation to conceive her two daughters, now both 17 and 20, with the former president, Barack Obama.
“We were trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going well. 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,” Obama, 54, writes in her upcoming memoir, Becoming, one of the most avidly anticipated political books in recent memory.
IVF is one form of assisted reproduction and typically involves removing eggs from a woman, fertilising them with sperm in a lab, and implanting a resulting embryo into the woman’s uterus. It costs thousands of dollars for every “cycle”, and many couples require more than one attempt. In the memoir, she 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.
“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 on ABC’s Good Morning America programme.
In the memoir, Obama also writes openly about everything from growing up in Chicago to confronting racism in public life and becoming the country’s first black first lady. She also lets loose a blast of anger at US President Donald Trump. She writes in the memoir that Trump’s questioning of whether her husband was an American citizen was crazy and mean-spirited.
“Its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him,” she writes in the memoir.
Trump had suggested that Obama was not born in the US but on foreign soil – his father was Kenyan. The former president was born in Hawaii. 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.”
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. She also accuses Trump of using body language to stalk Clinton during an election debate. She writes of Trump following Clinton around the stage, standing nearby and trying to diminish her presence.
AAP
