Sharing their struggles. It has been a long road to parenthood for many celebrity parents, including Chrissy Teigen and John Legend.
“You hear stories about [in vitro fertilization] working the first try, but you’ll hear a lot more stories about when it takes a few times,” the model told New York Magazine’s The Cut in April 2018. “Ours didn’t work the first time and it was devastating.”
At times, the Cravings: Hungry for More cookbook author wondered if she had done something wrong. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh I was on my feet too much, and that’s why.’ You just look for anything to blame, especially yourself,” Teigen explained at the time.
The pair’s IVF experience was successful in the end. Teigen and the EGOT winner welcomed daughter Luna in April 2016 and son Miles in May 2018. The Chrissy’s Court star announced in August 2020 that baby No. 3 was on the way, but she suffered a pregnancy loss the following month.
“Even as I write this now, I can feel the pain all over again. … Utter and complete sadness,” the Bring the Funny judge wrote of the tragedy in an October 2020 Medium essay. “People say an experience like this creates a hole in your heart. A hole was certainly made, but it was filled with the love of something I loved so much. It doesn’t feel empty, this space. It feels full.”
The Utah native is not alone in her fertility struggles, and Gabrielle Union, Kim Kardashian and more stars have all opened up about their surrogacy experiences over the years.
As for Lea Michele, the actress struggled to conceive her and Zandy Reich’s son, Ever, due to her polycystic ovary syndrome.
“[PCOS is] easy to manage it in your daily life, but when you’re trying to conceive, it’s much harder, especially if you have extremely irregular periods,” the Glee alum told Katherine Schwarzenegger of her condition in March 2021. “You never really know when you can get pregnant. On top of that, I had to have multiple procedures to remove polyps and cysts and scar tissue.”
The actress went on to say, “I was like, ‘Let’s just stop.’ … I kept thinking, ‘Maybe this isn’t meant to be for me. Maybe this isn’t going to happen.’ It’s something that for me, personally, was always my biggest fear in my entire life. It’s what I’ve wanted more than anything. Emotionally, it just started to build and build. … Then we got pregnant.”
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Keep scrolling to read more celebrities’ stories, from Bachelor’s Astrid Loch to One Tree Hill’s Hilarie Burton.