First lady’s two daughters conceived by in vitro fertilisation
Obama criticises Trump for encouraging ‘wingnuts and kooks’
Michelle Obama says she felt “lost and alone” after suffering a miscarriage 20 years ago and underwent in vitro fertilization to conceive her two daughters.
“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 on Friday on ABC’s Good Morning America breakfast show.
She told the television station: “We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken.”
Obama, 54, said she and her husband
Barack Obama had fertilization treatments to conceive daughters Sasha and Malia, now 17 and 20.
“I realized that as I was 34 and 35, we had to do
IVF,” she said in excerpts from an ABC special set to air on Sunday. “We had to do IVF.”
The revelations come before Tuesday’s release of Obama’s memoir Becoming.
In the new book she criticises Donald Trump for “encouraging wingnuts and kooks” and she writes openly about everything from growing up in Chicago to confronting racism in public life and becoming the country’s first black first lady.
Obama has offered few extensive comments on her White House years, since departing the presidential residence on the day of Trump’s inauguration in January, 2017. And memoirs by former first ladies, including Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush, are usually bestsellers.
In Becoming, Obama lets loose a blast of anger at Trump, writing how she reacted in shock the night she learned he would replace her husband in the Oval Office and tried to “block it all out”.
Trump suggested repeatedly and loudly in high-profile public forums that Barack Obama was not born in the US but on foreign soil, as his father was Kenyan. Trump was wrong – Obama was born in Hawaii and eventually displayed his birth certificate. Trump eventually, reluctantly, conceded Obama was American-born.
Michelle Obama also expresses disbelief over how so many women would choose a “misogynist” in Trump over Hillary 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.
Obama 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”.