Michelle Obama has never shied away from keeping it real. But in a revealing new podcast appearance, the former First Lady gets brutally honest about the raw, painful realities of fertility, marriage, and the pressure women face to stay silent through it all.
Speaking on The Diary of a CEO podcast, Michelle didn’t hold back as she unpacked the emotional weight of going through IVF — and how much more demanding it is for women than men.
“We don’t talk about our bodies and women’s health,” she told host Steven Bartlett. “There’s just not a lot of conversation about marriage or pregnancy or any of this. Our parents just didn’t talk about it. Their parents before them didn’t talk about it.”
Michelle, now 60, explained that she was 34 when she and Barack realized they were going to struggle to conceive naturally. By then, everything else seemed perfect — careers were in place, their lives were stable — but the reality of age and biology hit hard.
“No one tells you that there really is a biological clock, that’s not false! Women are born with a finite set of eggs, we don’t get anymore and every month we’re losing them,” she said. “There’s a period of time, usually in your 30s, where you go from fertile to not and it’s like falling off a cliff.”
The couple turned to IVF and would go on to welcome daughters Malia, born in 1998, and Sasha, born in 2001.
But the journey was anything but smooth. Michelle had suffered a miscarriage, an experience she said left her feeling “lost and alone".
In a sit-down with Good Morning America, she previously reflected: “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.”
And IVF wasn’t just emotionally draining — it was physically brutal.
“As a woman you’re carrying around this blow, owning the blow as if it’s your fault and so you’re carrying that burden,” Michelle told Bartlett. “That can become the first pressure point in the marriage. The woman is walking around feeling like a failure, not having anyone to talk to about her hormones going up and down, probably dealing with depression.”
“She’s carrying it all on her own. Then if you do IVF, the bulk of the work, all the shots—we are the petri dish in the process.”
She didn’t mince words when describing Barack’s role in the IVF process: “He would simply 'show up and c*m in a cup'. Oh yay, good for you,” she said, laughing — but clearly not amused.
“Women have to have shots every week,” she added. “You’re at the doctor’s office every month trying to count your eggs and hoping that you’re producing eggs, and then you have to go through the procedure and then you’re pregnant for nine months as your partner is going to the gym and keeping his figure.”
Michelle’s words cut straight through to a truth many women face but few speak about: “It’s a long way of saying there are many reasons why marriage, infertility, trying to have kids makes things difficult,” she said. “I try to tell couples, of course it’s hard to listen to but if you’re having troubles it’s totally normal.”
She also admitted that her marriage wasn’t immune from the pressures. At times, especially when Barack was in the state legislature and away more often, it caused serious strain.
“Marriage counselling for us was one of those ways where we learned how to talk out our differences,” she shared with ABC. “I know too many young couples who struggle and think that somehow there’s something wrong with them. And I want them to know that Michelle and Barack Obama, who have a phenomenal marriage and who love each other, we work on our marriage. And we get help with our marriage when we need it.”
And while she laid bare the emotional cost of fertility treatment, she didn’t hold back on the political damage either. In Becoming, Michelle called out Donald Trump for his promotion of the “birther” conspiracy — claiming Barack wasn’t born in the US.
“The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited,” she wrote, “of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. 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.”
Trump hit back after excerpts from the book were released, telling reporters: “Michelle Obama got paid a lot of money to write a book and they always insist you come up with controversy... I’ll never forgive him for what he did to our United States military by not funding it properly.”
But Michelle’s memoir is about much more than politics. It’s about vulnerability. About choosing openness in a culture that tells women to keep quiet.
“As soon as I allowed myself to feel anything for Barack,” she writes in the book, “the feelings came rushing—a toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfilment, wonder.”
From those early sparks of love to marriage counselling, fertility shots, and political storms, Michelle Obama is sharing her full story—and urging others to speak their truths too.