Michelle Obama has spoken candidly about her struggle to get pregnant for the first time, explaining that her daughters, Malia and Sasha were conceived via IVF, and that she suffered a miscarriage in her 30s.
In an interview to promote her new book, Becoming, the lawyer said ‘I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were, because we don’t talk about them.
‘We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken,’ she told ABC’s Good Morning America, adding ‘I realized that as I was 34 and 35, we had to do IVF’
Malia is now 20 and Sasha is now 17.
In Becoming, Michelle writes about everything from growing up in Chicago to facing - and fighting - racism in public life and becoming (perhaps that’s behind the title?) the country’s first black first lady.
Though we all remember those images of Michelle being stoic and diplomatic when faced with Donald and Melania Trump at the time of Trump’s inauguration, Michelle now takes aim at the current president saying he has been ‘encouraging wingnuts and kooks’. The night she learned Trump, who had long alleged that Barack Obama was unfit for the presidency because he was born in Kenya (he wasn’t), would be replacing him, she tried to ‘block it all out’.
After all that birther conspiracy, which Michelle calls ‘crazy and mean-spirited’ with an ‘underlying bigotry and xenophobia’ around her husband was dangerous: "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.’
That’s for sure, but what’s not for sure is why so many women voted for a ‘misogynist’, saying that her body ‘buzzed with fury’ when she saw the ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ video that really, should have proved a stumbling block to Trump’s presidency bid. She also balked when Trump later ‘stalked’ Hilary Clinton on-stage at a presidential election, saying, very deftly, that he was ‘trying to diminish our presence’.
Thankfully, Michelle, isn’t going to let anyone diminish her presence, even if she continues 'to be put off by the nastiness' of politics. The book looks set to be a shining example of her quip which has long become a motto for life - ‘when they go low, we go high.
1 in 4 pregnancies ends in miscarriage. For more information, visit The Miscarriage Association.