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Longtime host and media personality Tamron Hall shocked more than a few people when she announced that she was pregnant with her first child at 48-years-old.
Since that reveal, Hall has shared some of her fertility journey, including the fact that she and her husband used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive.
In addition to the taxing physical demands of having to inject herself, Hall shared that the whole process was emotionally trying as well.
According to Page Six, while speaking with Dr. Andre Perry and Dr. Joia Crear Perry about the costs of infertility treatments, Hall said, “I have to be honest with you, being in the IVF clinic, for a while I did feel guilty for being able to afford it. I felt like the game was rigged and although I grew up very poor [and] a 19-year-old single mother brought me home, that now I had an amount of money that put the odds in my favor in some way.”
Hall and her husband Steve Greener welcomed their son Moses in April 2019.
But the journey to her baby bundle was not easy.
In an interview with Allure, Hall shared that the emotional aspect of the journey was compounded by the physical realities.
“When I was traveling, I was afraid to give myself the injections. It was very painful and I couldn’t work up the nerve … It’s brutal,” she explained. “I’m fortunate to be able to have this procedure and access but the pain is real. You don’t want to be ungrateful, you don’t want to minimize what chance you have right now that someone else would beg for. Even though I was grateful and this was an opportunity I had, it still hurt. I’m still bleeding.”
In a recent article for The Nation, Dr. Andre Perry wrote about the discrimination in the job market and health care industry that prevent many Black families from being able to conceive in this way.
“Given the fact that so many Black people don’t have the kind of insurance that would allow them to pay for these expensive infertility treatments, in addition, most of us have lower amounts of wealth because of past discrimination. So those factors led me to say, ‘Hey, we should be having babies like white people.’ But the intent is to say, we should remove the barriers that prevent people from having families.”
You can watch a clip of Hall’s conversation with Dr. Andre M. Perry and Dr. Joia Crear-Perry in the video below.
