Kourtney Kardashian: IVF Journey Took "Mental And Physical Toll"

Kourtney Kardashian’s IVF journey was one that was partly documented on her tv show, The Kardashians. But Kourtney recently opened up a bit more about the impact undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) with her husband, Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, has had on her life, and her honesty is refreshing and much needed.

On December 8, Kardashian Barker shared a photo to Instagram Story, per Today, and updated how IVF has impacted her life. In the message, accompanied by a black and white photo of herself in front of a treadmill, the mom of three revealed she stopped IVF treatments a while ago, and she’s just now starting to feel more like herself.

“Finally started getting my energy back 10 months after stopping IVF,” she explained, “for anyone else going through it, it gets better!”

Her update comes following several months of publicly documenting her attempts at growing her family through IVF. And she was pretty candid about all the complex parts of her experience, calling it “awful” for her body and mood. Though she doesn’t mention the costs of IVF, it can be so expensive that IVF cost calculators are a major tool people utilize.

“The medication that they’ve been giving me, they put me into menopause,” Kardashian Barker explained during the April 2022 episode. “Travis and I want to have a baby, and so my doctor took us down this road of doing IVF, and it hasn’t been the most amazing experience,” she added.

In her experience, Kardashian Barker also struggled with how the public reacted to a common side effect of IVF treatments — weight gain. “Every single person on social media is always like, ‘Kourtney’s pregnant. Kourtney’s gained so much weight,’” she said of the continuous comments on her body. “It’s so rude to comment on people when you have no idea what they’re going through.”

Months later, in September 2022, Kardashian Barker said she and Barker had decided to pause their fertility treatments.

“We started an IVF journey, but I stopped,” she said to the Wall Street Journal. “It was a lot. I took a break to just focus on our wedding and getting married.”

When things are challenging, it’s hard to break through the narrative that you must always be positive. Kardashian Baker’s willingness to share the complexities of IVF with such a large platform will help so many other families by reminding them that they don’t always shave to find the good in the hard.