Mchelle Obama, the former first lady of the US, has revealed that she suffered a miscarriage 20 years ago and that she underwent in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to conceive her two daughters.
Ahead of Tuesday’s release of her memoir, “Becoming,” Michelle Obama also said she would never forgive President Donald Trump for promoting a bigoted conspiracy theory that questioned whether her husband was born in the United States, the Washington Post reported.
The former first lady in an interview with ABC News said that she felt “lost and alone” after suffering a miscarriage two decades ago. “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.”
She also revealed how she underwent IVF in order to give birth to Malia, now 20 years old, and Sasha, now 17.
Citing an advance copy of the book, the Washington Post quoted her as saying that the so-called birther movement, which falsely claimed former US president Barack Obama began life as a foreigner, was “crazy and mean-spirited” and could have put her family in danger.
“What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls?” Michelle Obama wrote. “Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.”
When Trump was asked about her comments on Friday, he did not answer directly and instead took a swipe at Barack Obama.
“I haven’t seen it. I guess she wrote a book. She got paid a lot of money to write a book, and they always insist that you come up with controversial [material],” he told reporters at the White House as he left for a trip to Paris.
“Well, I’ll give you a little controversy back: I’ll never forgive him for what he did to our United States military by not funding it properly. It was depleted. Everything was old and tired. And I came in, and I had to fix it,” Trump said.
Since the US Constitution requires a president be a natural-born citizen, the birther conspiracy was aimed at challenging the legality of Obama’s presidency.
Ahead of the 2016 election, Trump abandoned those claims about Obama, but he did not apologise.
Michelle Obama’s memoir chronicles her life growing up on Chicago’s South Side through her years inside the White House as a mother of two and the nation’s first African-American first lady.