“In recent years, a selection of celebrities have bravely been sharing their deeply personal and often heartbreaking stories in order to help others.”, — write: www.dailymail.co.uk
However, there is one topic that traditionally many stars have avoided discussing – infertility and baby loss.
Despite NHS figures stating that one in seven couples have trouble conceiving, the topic has remained taboo for many.
Yet in recent years, a selection of celebrities have bravely been sharing their deeply personal and often heartbreaking stories in order to help others.
Just this week, model Kelly Brook reflected on the heartbreak she faced when she suffered a miscarriage while six months pregnant.
And she isn’t alone in sharing her experience, with Lena Dunham revealing her pain at undergoing a double hysterectomy at just 31 years old, while Jennifer Aniston has detailed her 20-year battle to conceive.
Jennifer Aniston The Friends actress revealed last month that she endured a 20-year secret battle to have a baby after undergoing unsuccessful IVF and trying everything to get pregnant.
Jennifer has often found herself at the centre of pregnancy speculation over the years, and in a rare interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK she addressed the false narrative that she didn’t want to become a mother because she’s a ‘selfish workaholic’.
She said: ‘They didn’t know my story, or what I’d been going through over the past 20 years to try to pursue a family, because I don’t go out there and tell them my medical woes.
‘That’s not anybody’s business. But there comes a point when you can’t not hear it – the narrative about how I won’t have a baby, won’t have a family, because I’m selfish, a workaholic.
‘It does affect me – I’m just a human being. We’re all human beings. That’s why I thought, “What the hell?”’
Jennifer was married to actor Brad Pitt from 2000 to 2005. They split after he met actress Angelina Jolie on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith.
In 2022, Jennifer tragically revealed she had unsuccessfully tried IVF – and admitted she wished she had frozen her eggs years earlier.
‘It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,’ Jennifer said at the time.
‘My late 30s, 40s, I’d gone through really hard s**t, and if it wasn’t for going through that, I would’ve never become who I was meant to be. I was trying to get pregnant.
‘All the years and years and years of speculation… It was really hard. I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it.
‘I would’ve given anything if someone had said to me, “Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.” You just don’t think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed. But I have zero regrets.’
Jennifer was aged 35 when she split from Brad and previously said the suggestion he left her because she wouldn’t give him a child was an ‘absolute lie’.
Kelly Brook
This week Kelly Brook bravely reflected on the heartbreaking moment she lost her baby when she was six months pregnant.
The presenter, 45, became pregnant in 2011, while with former fiancé and Scottish rugby player Thom Evans who really wanted a child.
Kelly said the ‘horrific’ loss was so scarring, it left her ‘traumatised’ and left her never wanting to try for a baby again.
She explained: ‘Lo and behold I had a miscarriage at six months, which was the most traumatic, horrific thing that I’ve ever been through. It was just the most devastating thing.
‘It took me quite a long time for my body and for everything to kind of, I don’t think you ever fully recover from that, but our relationship didn’t survive that and I just had to pick myself back up and just move forward.’
Kelly, who has since married French model Jeremy Parisi, recently revealed that the couple made a conscious decision not to have children together, but admitted the reality still weighs on her mind.
‘The time has probably run out, I don’t know, I just have to get my head around it,’ she reflected.
‘If our marriage doesn’t end up successful in the long term, how would I feel seeing him go on and have children with other people?
‘We made the decision early on that we wouldn’t have children, but I can’t say I wouldn’t be heartbroken.’
Lena Dunham
Lena Dunham has also opened up in the past about her painful battle with infertility, feeling betrayed by her body and accepting she will ‘never be a biological mother’.
The actress and writer made the difficult decision at 31 years old to have a total hysterectomy to remove her uterus and cervix and an ovary after enduring years of endometriosis-related pain back in 2017.
The star suffered ‘years of complex surgeries measuring in the double digits’ and tried alternative treatments such as ‘pelvic floor therapy, massage therapy, pain therapy, color therapy, acupuncture and yoga’.
Doctors also discovered she had other medical issues that were causing her pain during the procedure.
She previously told Vogue: ‘In addition to endometrial disease, an odd hump-like protrusion and a septum running down the middle, I have retrograde bleeding, a.k.a. my period running in reverse so that my stomach is full of blood.’
Lena has admitted that after her hysterectomy, she became ‘obsessed’ with becoming a mother.
In her candid essay for Harper’s Magazine in 2020 Lena wrote: ‘The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby.’
Three years later, the Girls creator revealed she was exploring adoption when a doctor said she ‘might have a chance of harvesting eggs’ with her remaining ovary which was still producing eggs.
If her eggs were successfully harvested, she explained to readers that they would ‘be fertilized with donor sperm and carried to term by a surrogate.’
The process, however, did not work and Dunham recalled learning that none of her ‘eggs were viable on Memorial Day, in the midst of a global pandemic’.
She added: ‘There is a lot you can correct in life—you can end a relationship, get sober, get serious, say sorry—but you can’t force the universe to give you a baby that your body has told you all along was an impossibility.’
Deciding not to go down the road of IVF again she told People: ‘IVF destroyed my body.
‘Because of what my body has been through, subjecting it to such excruciating pain, only to come to the end and learn those eggs were not viable after working so hard through illness and discomfort and going through anxiety and depression, it is just clearly not something I can ever repeat.’
The Golden Globe winner continued: ‘I had hopes it would, but to be honest, I’d already made my peace about becoming an adoptive mother.
‘When everyone got so excited about there being this possibility that my one ovary could produce eggs, and with IVF and surrogacy, I could maybe still have a biological child, it pulled me away from what I think I already instinctively knew,’ she reflected.
In the summer Lena gave fans an update as she revealed she is hoping to expand her family with her husband Luis Felber.
‘I thought I would have the opportunity to experience my fertility and my cycle waning and it never was. Instead it was a very quick, sharp cut-off,’ she explained to The Sunday Times of her hysterectomy.
‘I will say we’re in the process of expanding our family in new ways,’ she added, but she would not expand on the comment, simply explaining: ‘I want to safely meet our children and then figure out how to talk about it.’
Dolly Parton
Dolly’s husband Carl Dean died last March at the age of 82, and despite nearly six decades together the pair never had children.
The legendary country singer has admitted she has no regrets that they chose not to expand their family in that way.
Asked if she regretted her decision on Larry King’s show she said: ‘No, at this day and time I regret it even less. I used to think I wanted children but I don’t have children but looking at the way this world is now I am almost glad I don’t.’
However Dolly had fertility struggles away from the spotlight after revealing in her 2017 book Dolly on Dolly: Interviews and Encounters with Dolly Parton that she had been diagnosed with endometriosis at the age of 35.
The singer went on to have a partial hysterectomy at 36, as she reflected: ‘Suddenly I was a middle-aged woman. I went through a dark time until I made myself snap out of it.
‘We never did think of adopting,’ she added. ‘I guess I didn’t have the time. I had my career and all, I had younger brothers and sisters, so I had that responsibility and that joy and that duty.’
She told Saga Magazine in 2023: ‘I haven’t missed it like I thought I might. When you’re a young couple, you think you’re going to have kids, but it just wasn’t one of those burning things for me.
‘I had my career and my music, and I was travelling. If I’d had kids, I’d have stayed at home with them. I’m sure and worried myself to death about them.’
Elizabeth Day
Journalist Elizabeth Day has been incredibly open about her longstanding fertility struggles, revealing how at 46 she has now ‘let go of the dream of conventional biological motherhood’.
The star, who hosts the hugely successful podcast How To Fail, tried for a baby for 12 years with the pressures ultimately contributing to the breakdown of her first marriage.
She went through two rounds of IVF, miscarriages, egg freezing and surgery on her womb – but eventually the ‘stress’ of the process became too overwhelming.
‘It’s very painful if you think something is meant for you and the universe is not giving it to you,’ she told The Times in September.
‘I think what I’ve gone through is understanding that maybe motherhood wasn’t meant for me, because other things are.’
Her desire to have a child also led her to have a surgical procedure to change her uterus, which she later described as ‘so painful’, and undergo an assisted fertility attempt through egg donation in the US with husband of four years, Justin Basini.
While Elizabeth, who is stepmother to Justin’s three children, described herself as ‘much more at peace’ now that she has stopped trying to have a baby, the journalist also admitted that not having a child will cause her ‘sadness for ever’.
She said: ‘Not having children will cause me sadness for ever but it doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing.’
Selena Gomez
While Selena Gomez is yet to have children, the singer has already opened up about how she will be unable to carry them herself due to her complicated health issues.
The actress was diagnosed with lupus, a disease that occurs when your body’s immune system attacks your own tissues and organs, in 2014.
And speaking to Vanity Fair last year she revealed that she ‘can’t carry’ children due to medical reasons.
‘I haven’t ever said this,’ Selena told the publication, ‘but I unfortunately can’t carry my own children.
‘I have a lot of medical issues that would put my life and the baby’s in jeopardy. That was something I had to grieve for a while.’
While she acknowledged her path to motherhood will be ‘different,’ the star said she is still as determined as ever to have a child of her own.
‘It’s not necessarily the way I envisioned it. I thought it would happen the way it happens for everyone,’ she said.
‘I’m in a much better place with that. I find it a blessing that there are wonderful people willing to do surrogacy or adoption, which are both huge possibilities for me.
‘It made me really thankful for the other outlets for people who are dying to be moms. I’m one of those people. I’m excited for what that journey will look like, but it’ll look a little different,’ she said.
Selena expressed that through surrogacy or adoption, the child will be ‘mine.’
‘At the end of the day, I don’t care. It’ll be mine. It’ll be my baby,’ she expressed.
Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness
Hugh Jackman has also been incredibly open about his struggles to have children with his ex-wife Deborra-Lee Furness.
The couple knew they wanted to have kids together from early on and started trying as soon as they were married as the Australian actress was already 40 years old.
However unfortunately they struggled to conceive and suffered from a couple of devastating miscarriages and unsuccessful IVF.
Hugh explained during an appearance on The Jess Cagle Interview: ‘Because of her age, we started [trying] straightaway when we [got] together.
‘We struggled, a couple miscarriages, [in vitro fertilization] – it was not easy. It was difficult, obviously particularly on Deb.’
Hugh explained that they ‘always wanted to adopt,’ so after IVF failed, they realised it was the right path for them.
‘I remember saying to her, “We always wanted to adopt – let’s just adopt now,”‘ he continued.
The former couple felt it was important to adopt a ‘mixed-raced’ baby, with Hugh adding: ‘Our motivation behind adopting was, “Where is the need?”
‘We just knew from talking with people in that space, when we were looking around, that the biggest need is in mixed-race kids.
‘A lot of people go into [adoption thinking] it’s really important to them for the kid to look like them, and honestly, for Deb and I, that just never even was an issue.
‘I want to tell my kids, “Your personality is interesting and it in some ways very much defines you. The color of your skin, whether you’re a male, whether you’re a female, that’s not who you really are. What really defines you is beneath all that.”‘
Benjamin Zephaniah
Very few, if any, high-profile male celebrities have spoken out about male infertility, however poet and novelist Benjamin Zephaniah explained that after undergoing tests he realised he has no sperm.
After noticing that his friends were having children and he wasn’t he decided to seek medical advice which showed he produced no sperm at all.
Speaking in an interview with The Times he admitted: ‘There was a period when I did that thing men do. They look at other men playing with kids in the park and think, “I can’t do that”.
‘But I’ve got such a good relationship with kids all over the world. People are always saying to me, “If you had your own kid, it would probably take away from your relationship with all these other kids,” so I just kind of resigned myself to that.’
It is used when couples are unable to conceive naturally, and a sperm and egg are removed from their bodies and combined in a laboratory before the embryo is inserted into the woman.
Once the embryo is in the womb, the pregnancy should continue as normal.
The procedure can be done using eggs and sperm from a couple or those from donors.
Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends that IVF should be offered on the NHS to women under 43 who have been trying to conceive through regular unprotected sex for two years.
People can also pay for IVF privately, which costs an average of £3,348 for a single cycle, according to figures published in January 2018, and there is no guarantee of success.
The NHS says success rates for women under 35 are about 29 per cent, with the chance of a successful cycle reducing as they age.
Around eight million babies are thought to have been born due to IVF since the first ever case, British woman Louise Brown, was born in 1978.
Chances of success
The success rate of IVF depends on the age of the woman undergoing treatment, as well as the cause of the infertility (if it’s known).
Younger women are more likely to have a successful pregnancy.
IVF isn’t usually recommended for women over the age of 42 because the chances of a successful pregnancy are thought to be too low.
Between 2014 and 2016 the percentage of IVF treatments that resulted in a live birth was:
29 per cent for women under 35
23 per cent for women aged 35 to 37
15 per cent for women aged 38 to 39
9 per cent for women aged 40 to 42
3 per cent for women aged 43 to 44
2 per cent for women aged over 44