Let’s jump right in: no, the COVID-19 vaccine does not cause infertility. That is a myth. 

“There is no evidence that the vaccine can lead to loss of fertility,” says Dr. Jessica Shepherd, an OB/GYN at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “While fertility was not specifically studied in the clinical trials of the vaccine, no loss of fertility has been reported among trial participants or among the millions who have received the vaccines since their authorization, and no signs of infertility appeared in animal studies.” 

It’s smart to have questions about medical care, and to read up before you decide what to put into your body, but there’s no reason to think that the COVID-19 vaccine could cause infertility. “Three of the leading professional organizations focused on pregnancy and fertility—the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine—all recommend that pregnant people get vaccinated, as well as those considering pregnancy,” Shepherd says.  

And still, the myth that COVID-19 vaccines cause infertility in women has been making the rounds on social media. Maybe it’s because this year has been so scary, so we’re more susceptible to fear-mongering. Maybe it’s because social media, along with lovely things like dog pictures and makeup reviews, is great at spreading misinformation. For whatever reason, even some people who typically believe in science and listen to doctors are buying in to this one. 

Then why have I heard this claim? 

You might have seen posts going around social media claiming that since the mRNA COVID vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) teaches the body to fight spike proteins, and since spike proteins are also involved in gestation, the vaccine could cause problems with pregnancy. That’s not true. 

As the CDC explains, something called “spike proteins” exist on the surface of the COVID-19 virus. The mRNA vaccine works because it “gives instructions for our cells to make a harmless piece” of those proteins. When our immune systems recognize the harmless version of the spike protein, they build an immune response that protects us from COVID. Afterwards, the proteins are quickly broken by our cells, which is a natural process cells do with proteins. Though the name mRNA sounds like DNA, the vaccine does not interact with DNA. 

“The two spike proteins are completely different and distinct, and getting the COVID-19 vaccine will not affect the fertility of women who are seeking to become pregnant, including through in vitro fertilization methods,” write Johns Hopkins senior director of infection prevention, Lisa Maragakis, M.D. and Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response, Gabor Kelen, M.D. 

There are also claims that people who have received the vaccine can “shed” spike proteins. “This is a conspiracy that has been created to weaken trust in a series of vaccines that have been demonstrated in clinical trials to be safe and effective,” said Dr Christopher Zahn, Vice President for Practice Activities at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told Reuters. 

These claims sound like science. But they’re made up. 

What’s the data on this? 

No vaccine trial used pregnant volunteers. But, as Shepherd notes, “Preliminary data on Covid-19 vaccines and pregnancy have demonstrated the safety of both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines in more than 30,000 patients with pregnancies.” 

She’s talking about the peer-reviewed study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, which looked at data from 35,691 pregnant participants, ages 16-54, who have now received an mRNA COVID vaccine. The study did not find any “obvious safety signals,” which means there were no patterns of adverse reactions to the vaccine. And Maragakis and Kelen point out that during Pfizer vaccine trials, 23 volunteers became pregnant, and none of the participants who received the vaccine experienced a miscarriage. 

Being an ESPN SportsCenter anchor and having my face seen by millions means I’ve had to fortify my mask to stay hidden. Once, I was late for work after having a miscarriage that morning. I’d made up an irresponsible excuse and was subsequently reprimanded. But they had no idea and the excuse was easier than the truth. I just couldn’t bring myself to say it. There have been countless times I’ve had to wipe my tears, fix my makeup and push aside the pain of actually feeling my body reject my baby. I focused on doing my job while keeping those close to me at a distance with the thought that I’m protecting them from my pain. Although they supported me, I knew they couldn’t relate.

After my most recent miscarriage, which was my final one because it was my last egg, I’ve decided to publicly share my struggles. After this last attempt and failure, I was devastated and have never felt more alone. So, I’m not just speaking up for solidarity, but for the changes that need to happen within this unique community. If you haven’t lived it, you don’t know what it’s like.

The average cost for fertility treatments (called IVF cycles) in the U.S. are between $10,000-$15,000, with an additional $1,500-$3,000 for medications per cycle. This alone keeps a large percent of the infertile population from moving forward with certain procedures because it would become a financial burden. And there’s still no guarantee it will work by the end of the cycle. Some who have sacrificed their life savings or accrued a second mortgage may not be able to afford trying again. These reproductive rights issues shouldn’t exist.

In addition to the costs, fertility clinics are not set up as a nurturing environment. They are supposed to be a place where families can find compassion and most of all hope, but are basically a cattle call. Number, egg, sperm. Zero emotional care. And with COVID, and having to go to doctor’s appointments alone, there is an extra layer of isolation added to the experience.

This week is National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW), a movement that encourages storytelling to empower and support one another by ensuring all voices of the infertility community are heard and understood. To help amplify the conversation, I’m partnering with Pregnantish and First Response Pregnancy, for a campaign called “This is What Infertility Looks Like,”, addressing the misconceptions people have about the medical issue of infertility, including who it affects. The campaign captures the important fact that infertility does not discriminate when it comes to race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, lifestyle, or other factors.

During these challenging years, I’ve learned that there is no right or wrong answer for how to process this journey and no one can put a timeline on personal grief. I don’t have to be the strongest in the room because it’s ok to cry and it’s ok to not be ok.

I am truly in awe every time I look at our two girls. My family is my home, and simply my everything. Looking at me, no one would know how much loss my husband and I have experienced to get here. But the moments of loss, guilt and failure don’t have to be a solo journey if we would all connect. We can remove some of the questions and learn from each other, and possibly take some of the stress away while sharing the pain.

“You’re a sick individual,” one woman commented on Chrissy Teigen’s September 2020 Instagram post. In the series of images, Teigen is sobbing on a hospital bed—she had just shared her traumatic pregnancy loss and the death of her infant son, Jack.

The commenter’s profile picture showed her kissing a fat, beautiful baby on the cheek.

“Aaaaaaahahahahahaha,” added another woman, whose bio identified her as “proudly” a mother. “Seems like she got over this real fast,” wrote another woman, whose own account shows her glowing and happy in a professional maternity shoot, followed by pictures of her newborn.

The death of a child is, perhaps, the most intimate loss. As a celebrity, Teigen is afforded an outpouring of love and a degree of privilege most people can’t imagine. But in using her public platform to share honestly from her grief, she was also bombarded with unrelenting cruelty. Not long after Jacks’ death, Teigen learned that she wouldn’t be able to get pregnant again. She (temporarily) shut down her Twitter account shortly after, citing constant abuse.

This month, Teigen is unveiling a new project—a fertility campaign. She’s partnering with the National Infertility Association to create an online platform, a “one-stop-shop,” of resources for people dealing with fertility issues, with the hope of reducing stigma and educating people. “We really wanted to create a community of people who are going through the same struggles,” she tells Glamour. “To go on this fertility journey together because it is such a journey.”

It’s deeply arresting that Teigen would choose to be the face of a major fertility education campaign shortly after losing a child and learning that she can no longer conceive. To do so after facing ridicule for that loss just feels unfathomable. What moved her to offer expertise to the public, when—

“—when you feel like they don’t deserve any more information from you ever again?” she finishes the question, laughing darkly. “I had been on the internet long enough to know that was going to happen,” she says, citing comments that accused her of begging for attention. “I just knew it would impact a lot more people positively than it would negatively.”

And it did. The vast, vast majority of comments on Teigen’s posts about her son’s death were not cruel but compassionate. The thread under her Instagram post looks like a message board for bereaved parents. “I know the heartache,” wrote one woman. “I lost four babies.” “My wife and I recently lost a son,” a man added. “I lost five in my mid-30s,” one woman wrote. “We experienced the loss of our twins at 16 weeks 5 days last night,” added another. “Sitting here with them now in the hospital, it made me feel a little a less alone having seen your experience as well.”

“I believe holding in anything where you’re feeling any kind of hurt or guilt or pain or shame is a terrible thing for your body,” Teigen says. Struggling with fertility “can be emotionally terrible, honestly.” And so even though she’s no longer trying to conceive, she’s not going to stop talking about it until it’s destigmatized.

The National Women’s Health Resource Center reports that a couple between the ages of 29 and 33 with a normal functioning reproductive system has only a 20-25% chance of conceiving in any given month. And men are just as likely to be the cause of fertility struggles as women, though you wouldn’t know that from the almost total absence of male infertility narratives in the mainstream. For women especially, Teigen says, the silence around fertility issues makes a painful experience into a torturous one.

Every year I write myself a letter, typically on the last hour of my birthday, with a series of statements declaring what I aspire to accomplish in the next year. I schedule this email to arrive in my inbox the morning of my birthday the following year filled with my professional, financial and relationship ambitions. My 2019 aspirations email landed in my inbox this past March during the onset of COVID-19 and one particular goal that I had yet to achieve stung:

“A year from now,” I wrote in 2019, “I will have paid rent and storage fees on frozen eggs in the same month.”

I turned 35 in 2019, and egg freezing was the plan to prevent me from falling off of what felt like one big fertility cliff. It’s the year that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists projects fertility rapidly declines and it was also the year my gynecologist diagnosed me with “age related female infertility.”

Shortly after I had scheduled the email to my future self in 2019, I booked a pap smear and consulted my gynecologist on my egg freezing options. It was the first time since my 20s that my gynecologist’s face tilted to the right as if something was wrong. My uterus had been enlarged to the size of a woman who had just completed her first trimester.

The cause? Fibroids. I had joined the 60% of Black women who had multiple, benign white tumors or growths, also known as myomas, in their uterus by the time they turn 35. Mine, like many women, were accompanied with pain, a heavy period—that would soon result in changing my pad every two hours—and a protruding belly.

My gynecologist advised that because of the potential impact of the medications I would take during egg freezing, I should first undergo surgery to remove the fibroids—but there was a chance it could end in a hysterectomy. 

Undergoing surgery while Black is scary—especially this surgery, considering Black women are twice as likely to have a hysterectomy. As a Black Queer feminist, I knew that the history of women of color and sterilization abuse at the hands of trusted physicians is long.

As Executive Director of mRelief, a nonprofit championing the rights of people to access and retain government benefits like food stamps with dignity, I also knew of the Relf sisters—two young girls who were among the 100,000-150,000 overwhelmingly Black people surgically sterilized in the 1970s when forced to choose between keeping their government benefits or sterilization.

Faced with surgery as a Black woman in 2020, I navigate choices of fertility preservation with a large degree of privilege: namely, I had savings and health insurance. But given the history, when it was time to find a doctor, I sought out a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago—a city that is 30 percent Black. She had a 0% hysterectomy rate and that gave me the confidence to move forward. Still, before I went into surgery, I signed the paperwork giving my doctor the permission to give me a hysterectomy in the event it was necessary to save my life. 

It was then that my aspiration to freeze my eggs became a mandate. The possibility of losing my uterus filled me with conviction and I was determined to do everything in my power to preserve my chances of seeing the face of my child one day.

Among my friends, I am something of an ambassador for childbirth. I am that eccentric friend who seeks to engage anyone in my close knit network of friends about the relationship between childbirth and supporting a healthy democracy. I firmly believe that one way I can embody my political commitment to a fair and just society is to nurture my progeny with sage, political values. My hope is that they will continue the fight for racial, social and economic justice that may not come into fruition in my lifetime, but with continued efforts, might come true in theirs.