The youngest daughter of “Duck Dynasty” stars Willie and Korie Robertson is opening up about her and her husband’s struggles with infertility.
Bella Robertson, 22, revealed the couple’s challenges in an interview with Us Weekly ahead of the premiere of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty: The Revival,” a reprisal of the popular series, this time focusing on the next generation of the Robertson family.
The young Robertson star talked about why she and her 26-year-old husband, Jacob Mayo, chose to reveal their infertility struggle in the upcoming show.
“I think people just don’t know what they’re talking about or who they’re talking to,” she said. “We share a story of infertility in the show and that’s something that we haven’t really shared publicly that much, but that’s something that others just don’t know. When you just look at someone on social media, you can’t know what anyone’s going through.”
Robertson and Mayo were married in June 2021. As they’ve been attempting to have kids, Mayo said he wishes getting pregnant “was as easy as people act like it is.”
“I think what we’ve learned in marriage — and you’ll see in our story in the show — is that I wish getting pregnant and having kids was as easy as people act like it is,” he told the magazine. “Just, ‘Oh, I can just pop out a kid,’ or, ‘If we want to wait, we get to choose to wait.’ It’s not that transactional of a thing.”
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Mayo added, “I think that’s kind of the reason when people say stuff, it’s just like, if it was easy or if it was easy not to, we would. But it’s not that simple, I would say.”
The young couple was originally reticent to share their fertility journey, but ultimately changed their minds with the hopes their transparency would help others facing the pains of infertility.
Bella Robertson said the openness just “felt right.”
“It was not an easy decision,” she recalled of talking about infertility on camera. “I don’t think we necessarily intended on sharing it even, but it felt right. … This is just one of the ways that we are showing up and being our authentic selves on this new show.”
She continued, “I think that we both felt like if we could help anybody — especially, what are the odds that we’re on this stage, where we can share something that is so real for so many?”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 12% of American couples face infertility and, per the World Health Organization, 17.5% of the global adult population exeperience infertility.
After years of struggling with infertility and suffering four miscarriages, Karen and Anthony Monetti are among those who turned to what they hoped would be a holistic solution to their problem.
Karen Monetti told CBN News in January her doctor immediately wanted her to undergo in vitro fertilization, but she and her husband were opposed to such treatments. She said they wanted to find a natural way of addressing infertility and “put it in God’s hands.”
Their primary concern with IVF is it involves creating embryos that may go unused.
“I didn’t want to have multiple eggs that were conceived just sitting there frozen,” she said. “I could not bring myself to that, knowing that there was life there that was not inside of me and I was not birthing.”
Instead, the Monettis pursued an alternative treatment, called restorative reproductive medicine, which is a medical approach to infertility that centers on diagnosing and treating underlying problems that could cause reproductive or gynecological issues rather than bypassing them with workarounds like IVF.
After both Anthony and Karen Monetti underwent testing, the RRM team determined Karen Monetti was dealing with significant blood clots and hormone issues, both of which were treated. Soon therafter, Karen Monetti became pregnant.
“I don’t think many people know it exists,” she said of the medical care she received. “I think RRM is not talked about in the mainstream medical practices. I think it’s just, ‘Go to IVF, go to IVF.’”
You can read more about their story here.
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