Diana, Princess of Wales
“Well, everybody was thrilled to bits. It had been quite a difficult pregnancy — I hadn’t been very well throughout it — so by the time William arrived it was a great relief because it was all peaceful again, and I was well for a time. Then I was unwell with [postpartum] depression, which no one ever discusses … you have to read about it afterwards, and that in itself was a bit of a difficult time. You’d wake up in the morning feeling you didn’t want to get out of bed, you felt misunderstood, and just very, very low in yourself … I never had had a depression in my life. But then when I analyzed it, I could see that the changes I’d made in the last year had all caught up with me, and my body had said: ‘We want a rest.’… I received a great deal of treatment, but I knew in myself that actually what I needed was space and time to adapt to all the different roles that had come my way. I knew I could do it, but I needed people to be patient and give me the space to do it.” — BBC1, November 1995
Christie Brinkley
“After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body’s way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn’t meant to be, and that it was better for everybody. But after the second one, it was really devastating. Four months is a lot of living with that little life in you — thinking about it, eating right for it, nurturing it and all of a sudden, it dies. After the second one, we decided to try in vitro, because both Peter and I felt we couldn’t handle another failure.” —Good Housekeeping, 1998
Nicole Kidman
“Anyone that’s been in the place of wanting another child or wanting a child knows the disappointment, the pain, and the loss that you go through trying and struggling with fertility.
Fertility is such a big thing, and it’s not something I’ve ever run away from talking about … We were in a place of desperately wanting another child. I couldn’t get pregnant … [Our surrogate] was the most wonderful woman to do this for us. I get emotional talking about it because I’m so grateful to her.” —Australia’s 60 Minutes, February 2011