Michelle Obama has opened up about raising her two daughters, Sasha and Malia, and the struggles she and her husband, Barack, had conceiving, namely in her 2018 book “Becoming.”
As maternal health, IVF, and more remain major topics for Black women, Obama used a live taping of her “IMO” podcast to hold court with Serena Williams, discussing her journey to motherhood.
“I don’t know about all of you, but I know that when I struggled to conceive, I took that on, like a personal failure,” Obama told the gathered crowd.
Williams interjected, “I don’t think that we have that conversation enough about how many times that either you conceive and you have a miscarriage, or whether you conceive, and it doesn’t work. So I feel like the only times it works is when you’re not trying to conceive, but that’s right.”
In front of the audience, Obama alluded to the fertility journey she wrote about in “Becoming,” recalling that she got pregnant and had a miscarriage, which devastated her and Barack. After trying and trying and not being able to conceive, the couple turned to IVF, which helped Michelle get pregnant with the couple’s daughters.
According to a 2025 study conducted by the National Women’s Law Center, Black women are almost twice as likely as either Hispanic or non-Hispanic white women to experience infertility in the United States, due in large part to medical conditions like fibroids and pelvic inflammatory disease.
The “silent shame” of infertility weighs heavily in some households, even ones like the Obamas, before they turned to IVF to conceive their girls. But said shame goes deeper than just hearing the words “it’s a shame you can’t have a child” as the medical reasoning, inadequate care, and other issues are just as prominent.
The lack of care and knowledge about women weighed on Obama during her conversation with Williams.
“The truth is that we don’t pay enough attention to women’s health. There’s so much we don’t know about our bodies so much that doctors don’t share with us,” she said. “Even the issue of conceiving and freezing eggs, if you don’t have the right doctor at the right time, you may not get that information. I still know young women who aren’t thinking about freezing their eggs because nobody mentioned that to them.”
Williams, who has two girls with husband Alexis Ohanian, famously revealed that she won her 23rd Grand Slam title at the 2017 Australian Open while seven weeks pregnant. While being a mother had long been on Williams’ mind, she decided that her career took priority around 27, prompting a decision she advised others in her friend circle to adapt.
“I tell all my friends of age, freeze your eggs,” she told Obama. “Because I just feel like that is the best thing that you can do as a woman. I froze my eggs. And once I did it, all this pressure came off of my shoulders.”
Elsewhere in their hour-long conversation, Obama and Williams opened up about how the tennis star nearly died while giving birth, the joy and strength that she learned from her mother and more.
“What a lot of people don’t realize is that when we travel—every time we went to Australia, probably actually every time we went to France, my mom was always there,” Williams revealed. “My dad actually never went to those tournaments, and so she was always our coach for all that time, and so I don’t know how many Australian Opens I won, and she basically coached me through all of them.”
She added, “I remember one time when I was 89 in the world and everyone had written me off. I was like 20 something and they said I’d never win again. I was playing Maria Sharapova, she said ‘You got this.’ She told me exactly how to play. And I won in less than an hour. And it was really genius. My mom is not someone that’s gonna fill a room. She’s gonna say one word and it’s going to be the most powerful word in the room.”
