Adrienne Bailon revealed that she and husband Israel Houghton spent over seven figures on in-vitro fertilization (IVF) while trying to conceive.
Over the weekend, the 40-year-old actress told People that the pair exhausted all their resources before deciding to have her 1-year-old son, Ever James, via surrogate.
“I only did eight cycles of IVF, but that doesn’t include the amount of IUIs I did and every other kind of imaginable treatments that you could imagine for fertility,” the “Real” host told the outlet.
“So it was a pretty tough six years of trying to have my son,” she added.
When asked for the estimated total of all the treatments, Bailon said they spent “easily over a million.”
The mother of one also “recognized” that spending that amount of money “is not realistic for the average person.”
The former “Cheetah Girls” star and the producer, 52, secretly welcomed their son in August 2022 after keeping the pregnancy hidden from the public.
“We have quietly prayed while sitting on this most magnificent secret for the last 9 months,” she shared on Instagram at the time alongside a black and white photo of the family of three.
“He is worth every tear, every disappointment, every delayed prayer, every IVF cycle, every miscarriage. Everything. All we feel is joy and overwhelming love & gratitude.”
Before welcoming their little one, Bailon was very open about her years-long fertility struggles — despite the unwarranted comments that often followed.
For more Page Six you love…
The former talk show host told Page Six last year that going through IVF while working in television proved to be one of “the hardest times of [her] life.”
Bailon said she gained “over 20 pounds” and was constantly dealing with “weight fluctuations” and “bloating” due to the hormonal injections.
“When I was on ‘The Real,’ people would write in the comments on the page like, ‘Oh she’s definitely pregnant. I can see her face is full or her stomach is bloated. I think she’s pregnant,’ and that was really hard,” she told us.
She added, “I went through a lot of changes… it made me feel super insecure. I feel like for a really long time I was like, ‘I’m not going to do any red carpets’… I just wasn’t feeling my best, and I feel like I was already going through so much with my emotional level, so to be criticized on a physical level did not help.”
Want more celebrity and pop culture news?
Start your day with Page Six Daily.
Thanks for signing up!
Despite the toll it all took on her mental health — and bank account — Bailon told us being a mother changed her entire outlook on life.
“The best thing about motherhood is seeing the world through my child’s eyes,” she gushed. “I feel like even though I am going to be 40 this year, I am zero years old because I have these new experiences with my child now.”
“Just the smallest things that he discovers — from his toes to a toy — I am in awe of watching him grow up.”