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Credit: Bravo
Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Bozoma Saint John has been open about her fertility journey on the show; however, she recently revealed she’s taking a break from it.
While discussing the topic, she also talked about losing one of her children, whom she had given birth to, and her divorce.
“I’ve decided to take a break for a moment,” she told Juicy Scoop host Heather McDonald about her fertility journey with fiancé Keely Watson. “We’re going to get through our weddings, and then we’re going to pick it up again. I’m not sure if I will… go through retrieval again, but… there are other options. There’s egg donors… surrogates… I’m not even sure necessarily that I want to carry the baby. So we’ll see.”
While Boz is physically okay to proceed with in vitro fertilization, she claimed, “psychologically, it’s a different story.”
“I’ve obviously had a lot of therapy to manage my grief and all the things, but I hadn’t dealt with this in particular,” she explained. “I’ve dealt with the grief of losing Eve, I’ve dealt with the grief of losing my husband, I’ve dealt with the scariness of getting into another relationship… I’ve done those things. I hadn’t yet tackled the having another baby grief and scare.”
Boz admitted she always wanted more children, but, after losing her one child and getting divorced, she was “too afraid.”
“I was like, first of all, I don’t want to put my health at risk,” she said of her considering earlier in her life to have another baby. “But yet I hadn’t talked to any doctor. Yeah, I was just over here diagnosing myself. I was like, I don’t want to do it without a partner. It’s really hard to be a single mom. I was like, I don’t know – I’m barely surviving doing the one, I don’t know if I could do it with two. Or three. So… I didn’t freeze my eggs, I didn’t do anything.”
Boz noted that, in hindsight, she wishes she would have “just moved on the desire knowing that like, ‘Okay, well let me just give myself a chance.’ You know, instead of putting it to bed.”
When discussing losing her child, Boz explained she “got pregnant, and unfortunately, I got very ill during my pregnancy. I developed severe preeclampsia, and my daughter passed away on the day she was born. It was – it’s still hard for me to articulate, but it was maybe one of the most devastating things.”
She noted this was, possibly, the “first fracture” in her relationship.
“While he didn’t blame me, I felt like he blamed me,” she elaborated. And I think that was – I think I made that up.”
Boz claimed her desperation to be a mother led her to get pregnant three months later, during which she got “sick,” was “terrified,” and ended up being placed on bedrest at the six-month mark.
Once her daughter was born, she ended up being a premature baby, which led to her being in the NICU for six weeks. Understandably, this put more pressure on her marriage.
“So a year after she was born we separated and I was like,’I can’t. I can’t do this,’” she concluded.