Conservationist and celebrity Bindi Irwin has spoken out about her battle not only with endometriosis, but infertility, urging people to be more thoughtful with their words.
In 2020, Irwin announced her pregnancy with husband Chandler Powell, though at the time, it was still early. “Though I’m still in my first trimester, we really want you to be part of our journey from the beginning of this new life chapter,” she wrote. “We couldn’t wait to share the news as this beautiful little being has become the most important part of our lives.”
From there, she included her followers in her pregnancy, sharing ultrasound photos and eventually, celebrating the birth of their daughter… which happened to come on the couple’s one-year wedding anniversary. They named their daughter Grace Warrior Irwin Powell, but have had no other children since then — which Irwin said has led to many uncomfortable questions.
In a recent interview with People, she spoke about having endometriosis, and the struggles she’s had to conceive. She called Grace her “tiny miracle.”
Irwin went public with her endometriosis diagnosis earlier this year, saying she had struggled with “insurmountable fatigue, pain [and] nausea” for 10 years. “A doctor told me it was simply something you deal with as a woman [and] I gave up entirely, trying to function through the pain,” she wrote on Instagram. Endometriosis is a condition in which tissue which is similar to that which grows inside a woman’s uterine lining grows outside the uterus. As Mayo Clinic explained:
[B]ecause this tissue has no way to exit your body, it becomes trapped. When endometriosis involves the ovaries, cysts called endometriomas may form. Surrounding tissue can become irritated, eventually developing scar tissue and adhesions — bands of fibrous tissue that can cause pelvic tissues and organs to stick to each other.
Endometriosis can cause pain — sometimes severe — especially during menstrual periods. Fertility problems also may develop. Treatments for the condition are available.
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“Going in for surgery was scary but I knew I couldn’t live like I was,” Irwin wrote. “Every part of my life was getting torn apart because of the pain. To cut a long story short, they found 37 lesions, some very deep [and] difficult to remove, [and] a chocolate cyst. [My doctor’s] first words to me when I was in recovery were, ‘How did you live with this much pain?’ Validation for years of pain is indescribable.”
Irwin explained in her People interview that doctors frequently shrugged off her pleas for help, or downplayed her pain.
“It’s so hard because you feel like it’s inescapable,” she says. “You don’t know what’s wrong with you, and then when people tell you ‘It’s all in your head’ or ‘you’re hormonal’ or ‘just have a cup of tea, lay down,’ you end up feeling so desperately alone because there’s no answers.”
Many women are frequently told to take hormonal birth control when they are experiencing symptoms of endometriosis, though it does not actually fix the problem. For people like Irwin, who want to have a family, it’s not an option at all, particularly when surgical treatments actually can treat the disease — giving women a chance of actually having a baby. For Irwin, it was something she never thought would happen.
“I feel like it is a universal question for women,” she said, of people asking when she will have more children. “Which is heartbreaking because you never know what’s going on in someone’s life and what’s happening behind closed doors. And someone asking you, ‘Why aren’t you having more children? It’s your responsibility to have more children.’ It breaks your heart because we all have a different journey and a different story.”
“For us personally, we feel so lucky to have Grace,” she continued. “I think that every day I wake up and I look at our beautiful daughter and think she is our tiny little miracle and it makes me cry because we were very, very lucky to have her. And there was every chance that we wouldn’t have been able to have a little one, so to have our beautiful girl, we are so lucky. And I wish more people would pause before asking, ‘Why aren’t you having more children?'”
