Gabrielle Union Discusses Her Fertility Struggles: 'It Just Feels Like a Lot of Shame'

On Monday, Gabrielle Union shared an emotional video on IGTV detailing her long, painful fertility journey. The eight-minute clip covers her “eight or nine” miscarriages, a diagnosis of adenomyosis (a condition in which the inner lining of the uterus breaks through the muscle wall) and eventual pregnancy-via-surrogacy that lead to the birth of her first child with husband Dwayne Wade last month. Kaavia James Union Wade was born on November 7.

“It just feels like a lot of shame,” Union says of her years of infertility issues, “Just years of shame and humiliation and betrayal of your body. It’s so many emotions.”

Union has been very vocal about her road to motherhood for a while now: in her 2017 memoir We’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True, she wrote that in all her attempts to conceive, she had become “a prisoner of trying to get pregnant.”

Since Kaavia’s delivery, her tone has shifted. Over the weekend, she and Wade sat down with Oprah in their first lengthy interview since the birth with a more optimistic message: “There’s many paths to parenthood, to motherhood. It doesn’t have to match your friend’s, your sister’s, your mama’s. Every path is real and beautiful and valid and worthwhile,” Union told Oprah. “But more than anything, you are not alone. You don’t have to suffer in silence. You don’t have to suffer alone. There’s hope. There’s answers. We got you.”