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November 14, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – On the off chance you just didn’t get enough of Michelle Obama over the past decade, the former First Lady has just released a brand-new memoir. Becoming, the publisher claims, tells the life story of “one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era.”

Political tell-alls rarely live up to such audacious promotional materials, but they can usually be counted on to provide a few morsels of new and interesting information. This one is no different.

Among the revelations in Becoming, per the Associated Press, is the fact that the Obamas suffered a miscarriage before the arrival of their daughters Sasha and Malia.

“We were trying to get pregnant and it wasn't going well,” Mrs. Obama writes. “We had one pregnancy test come back positive, which caused us both to forget every worry and swoon with joy, but a couple of weeks later I had a miscarriage, which left me physically uncomfortable and cratered any optimism we felt.”

“I felt like I failed because I didn't know how common miscarriages were because we don't talk about them,” she elaborated last week in an interview with ABC. ''We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we're broken.” Eventually, however, they turned to in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive their two daughters. The book describes how she worked to “manipulate my reproductive system into peak efficiency” as part of the process.

Obviously, any miscarriage is tragic, and any couple’s experience losing a child deserves empathy. At the same time, the experience clearly didn’t get America’s most pro-abortion president yet or his pro-abortion wife – who once claimed her husband’s stance was about respecting the “sacred responsibility of parenthood” – to more deeply consider prenatal death beyond how it affected them personally.

Was it a tragedy because you had a son or daughter you’ll never meet, who had intrinsic worth but lost his or her short life…or simply because Barack and Michelle didn’t get what they wanted when they wanted it? Judging by the Obamas’ deeds ever since, it’s the latter in their eyes…which is awfully hard to square with all the former president’s messaging about “empathy.”

Then there’s the former First Lady’s promotion of IVF, which has launched dozens of fawning headlines that mask some grim implications. Again, every humane heart feels for the inability to have children, but her example is promoting a technique that conceives scores of “excess” embryonic humans only to kill them, turning human life into a commodity to be bartered over.

Imagine the good that could be done by a former First Lady using her experience to promote adoption, or raise awareness of ethical infertility treatments. Alas, the Obamas’ corrosive influence on American culture waning just because they left the White House was too much to hope for.

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Calvin Freiburger is a Wisconsin-based conservative writer and 2011 graduate of Hillsdale College. His commentary and analysis have been featured on NewsReal Blog, Live Action, and various other conservative websites. Before joining LifeSiteNews, he spent two years in Washington, DC, working to build support for the Life at Conception Act with the National Pro-Life Alliance, then worked a year and a half as assistant editor of TheFederalistPapers.org. You can follow him on Twitter @CalFreiburger, and check out his Substack: calvinfreiburger.substack.com.