Being rich and famous comes with a lot of perks, but there’s no amount of money that can guarantee a stress-free experience with trying to have children. Just as many everyday women have dealt with fertility issues like trouble conceiving, miscarriages, and stillbirths, so have these 15 celebrity women. And for every one star who speaks out, there’s likely a handful more who just aren’t ready to share their stories yet.
Pregnancy struggles are a very personal thing to endure, but it does help so much to know that anyone can go through the same horrific experiences. Every time a celebrity opens up about her fertility journey, it makes the rest of us feel less alone.
Here are 15 stars who’ve spoken candidly about their challenges โ and no doubt helped countless others by doing so.
Jinger Duggar
When Jinger announced that she was expecting in 2020, she shared at the same time that she’d preveiously experienced a pregnancy loss. “Jer and I were rejoicing with our families as we announced that I was pregnant. Yet in God’s perfect timing, it was the next morning that I awoke knowing something wasn’t right. Within moments, I knew that I’d lost the baby,” she said on Instagram. “I know many of you can relate. The minutes feel like hours, the hours like days, don’t they? I was helpless โ nothing I could do would restore the lost life.”
Nicole Kidman
The actress struggled with fertility issues during her marriage to Tom Cruise and later to Keith Urban, although she did eventually have her “miracle” baby Sunday Rose. Her other children were either adopted or born via surrogate.
“I’ve had an ectopic pregnancy, miscarriages, and I’ve had fertility treatments. I’ve done all the stuff you can possibly do to try to get pregnant,” Nicole revealed in 2012. “So the way it just happened with Sunday was like, ‘What?’ The percentages were so low. It is the miracle in my life.”
Lily Allen
The singer has been candid about experiencing a “horrendous” stillbirth at six months pregnant in 2010. “It’s not something that you get over,” she told the Sun. “I held my child, and it was really horrific and painful โ one of the hardest things that can happen to a person.”
In addition to losing her baby, Lily experienced near fatal complications brought on by the stillbirth. “I nearly died. But I was numb and I didn’t care. I’d just lost my baby and that is a reflection of how numb I was,” she recalled.
Chrissy Teigen
Even before her stillbirth last year, Chrissy has been open about her fertility struggles. She conceived Luna and Miles via IVF after she had a difficult time getting pregnant on her own. “The big question was why this wasn’t working for us when I was young and he was healthy,” she told Self. “I thought, people get pregnant by accident all the time! How does this happen?”
Tori Roloff
Tori has two children with Little People, Big World star Zach Roloff. The duo was expecting a third child in 2021, but Tori ended up miscarrying. “We were so excited when we found out we were expecting baby #3, and we couldn’t wait to share. We went in for our first ultrasound at 8 weeks and found out that we lost our sweet baby two weeks earlier,” she wrote on Instagram in March.
She added that she hoped her sharing her story would help others as well as herself. “I post this in hopes that it will touch just one mama and let them know you’re not alone. I also post this selfishly as a form of healing for myself. I felt as though I needed to acknowledge our sweet angel baby so I could go on sharing my babies here with me.”
Courteney Cox
According to NBC, the Friends star has a rare blood antibody that attacks the fetus when she’s pregnant, and she experienced several miscarriages before learning that. “I remember one time I had just had a miscarriage, and Rachel was giving birth on the show. It was like that same time. Oh my God, it was terrible having to be funny,” she said.
Beyoncรฉ
Beyoncรฉ has spoken about having trouble getting and staying pregnant, as she had a miscarriage before Blue Ivy was born and reportedly had nearly given up on having more children when she finally conceived her twins, Sir and Rumi. “Having miscarriages taught me that I had to mother myself before I could be a mother to someone else,” she told Elle in 2019. She’d previously spoken about one of her miscarriages in her HBO documentary Life Is But a Dream, calling it “the saddest thing I’ve ever been through.”
Elizabeth Banks
After struggling to conceive on her own, the Pitch Perfect star turned to surrogacy for her two children. She told Porter that she sometimes feels criticized for taking that path, though. “I definitely think I’m still judged for what I’ve done and that people don’t understand my choices, but I don’t feel I owe anybody any explanation,” she said. “And if my story helps people feel less alone on their journey, then I’m grateful for that.”
Jaime King
Jamie tried for years to get pregnant with her son James. “8 yrs of pain & undiagnosed (polycystic ovary syndrome) & endometriosis,” she said on Instagram, recounting her brutal journey to giving birth. “5 miscarriages, 5 rounds of IVF, 26 IUIs, most with no outcome, 4-1/2 years of trying to conceive, 26 hours of brutal labor, early delivery b/c of sudden preeclampsia, tearing and tearing after the stitches were in once I was home.”
Moms are honestly superheroes.
Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth has two beautiful children, but she sadly lost her third in a miscarriage that nearly took her own life as well. She talked about the difficult experience in 2013. “My children ask me to have a baby all the time,” she said. “I am missing my third. I’m thinking about it. I had a really bad experience when I was pregnant with my third. It didn’t work out and I nearly died. So I am like, ‘Are we good here or should we go back and try again?'”
Michelle Obama
In an interview with Good Morning America, the former first lady revealed that she’d had to turn to IVF to get pregnant with her two daughters. Prior to that, she’d experienced a miscarriage that left her devastated. “I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were because we don’t talk about them,” she said. “We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken.”
Shawn Johnson
Shawn’s first pregnancy with her husband, Andrew East, ended in a miscarriage that left Shawn feeling like things were her fault โย even though they of course weren’t. “I had these guilty feelings of, ‘I can’t even take care of child for a week in my stomach, I can’t raise a child on my own,'” Shawn said. “I felt guilty to Andrew that I had lost his child, and I felt guilty to God that I lost His child.”
The duo eventually went on to have a healthy baby girl, and they’re currently expecting again.
Khloรฉ Kardashian
One of the plotlines on the last season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians was Khloรฉ trying to find a surrogate after being advised by her doctor to not carry again herself. She admitted that the surrogacy process was hard for her. “Me not having control over certain outcomes makes me very nervous,” she said.
Gabrielle Union
After nine miscarriages, Gabrielle turned to surrogacy to have her daughter. “I’m so glad I got over myself and my fear of what people would think of me if I did not carry my own child,” she told Today. “It’s OK to bring your child into the world in a way that is not through your body. The world will not consider you a failure. Every route to parenthood is perfect, worthwhile, and amazing.”
Kate Walsh
The Grey’s Anatomy star was never able to have children of her own because she had early-onset menopause. “My initial reaction was fear. For good reason, in some ways, because for me it was early and that meant no children as well, and that was a pretty dramatic and traumatic piece of information,” the actress told She Knows.
