Anne Hathaway confirmed in late July that she’s expecting her second child with husband Adam Shulman, but in her announcement, she also shared that her path to pregnancy wasn’t an easy one. Since then, the actress has been speaking candidly about her experience with infertilityto let other women going through the same thing know they’re not alone. In a new interview with The Daily Mail, published Thursday (August 1), Hathaway opened up even more about her struggle to get pregnant, saying that going through “infertility hell” left her feeling “broken” and “devastated.”
“Each time I was trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going my way, someone else would manage to conceive,” she told the Mail. “I knew intellectually that it didn’t happen just to torment me, but, to be honest, it felt a little bit like it did.”
This is precisely why she addressed her fertility issues in her July pregnancy announcement. Alongside a black-and-white picture of herself, Hathaway wrote in the caption: “For everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies. Sending you extra love.”
In the interview, she also explained her decision to be so open in her post: “When I said to them: ‘This has happened to me, it broke my heart, it broke me,’ so many of them said: ‘It happened to me, too,’ and that was the thing that allowed me to come through it, to feel my pain without having anyone rush in to define it or cure it.”
Hathaway went on to discuss her feelings about social media and how Instagram does not make easy for women struggling to have a baby. “I sometimes think Instagram makes life look really breezy, but that’s not the whole story,” she said. “By leaving out the sad part, we make women who are struggling with this feel isolated and lonely; we make them feel like it’s all their fault. I wanted to be more sensitive than that.”
The actress, who has a 3-year-old son, also said more conversations about infertility need to be had so that we can collectively put an end to the social stigmas surrounding pregnancy and children.
“What made matters worse was that I was embarrassed to feel like that because there was no conversation to be had about it. This is something people don’t talk about, and I think they should,” Hathaway told the Daily Mail.
“So, when I was writing that post, I was thinking about that one follower I might reach, the woman who’s in hell about this and can’t figure out why it’s not happening for her,” Hathaway said. “She’s going to see my announcement and, while I understand she will be happy for me, I also know that something about it will make her feel worse. I just wanted to say: ‘Look, this wasn’t as easy for me as it looks.'”
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