Was Tyra Banks’ IVF journey harder because of her fame?

Yes, it certainly was.

Supermodel Tyra Banks has talked about going through infertility and failing multiple cycles of IVF, all under the public eye. After seven failed IVF cycles over several years, she conceived her son, York, in January 2016 via surrogacy.

All those years of yearning, trying, failing, and waiting were not easy, especially as people kept asking her about it.

“I am so tired of seeing on my social media, ‘Why don’t you have kids?’ You don’t know what I’m going through, you have no idea,” she said. “For any woman, it is none of your business what somebody is going through.”

Tyra Banks opened up about more intimate details on her struggle to conceive in her memoir ‘Perfect is boring’ that she co-authored with her mother, Carolyn London.

London also talked about her emotional turmoil due to the failed attempts, as she said, “It hurt me so much to watch her struggle through that. She set up a nursery and, in the bathroom, she put a tile in the floor that said, ‘Mommy Already Loves You.’ And then she found out the IVF had failed,” London wrote.

“It ripped my heart out.”

Ms. Banks wanted to become a mother since she was 23 but it could not happen and eventually she turned to surrogacy and had a baby boy in 2016, when she was 43 years old.

Tyra Banks’ IVF journey felt especially distressing because it forced her to confront something she could not simply achieve through ambition, discipline, or patience. For years, she had focused intensely on building her career, constantly pushing motherhood further into the future while assuming there would still be time later on.

When she eventually began trying to have a child, the process became emotionally overwhelming because reality did not match that expectation.

A major part of the struggle was the emotional uncertainty that comes with fertility treatment. IVF is not just physically demanding -- it creates repeated cycles of hope, waiting, anxiety, and disappointment.

Tyra spoke openly about how draining it was to keep going through that process while still maintaining her normal public life and professional responsibilities. From the outside, people saw a successful, confident celebrity, but privately she was dealing with fear, frustration, and the feeling that her body was no longer cooperating with the timeline she had imagined for herself.

Another difficult aspect was the sense of isolation. Fertility struggles can feel deeply personal, and many people silently carry shame or disappointment around them. In Tyra’s case, there was also the pressure of being constantly visible in the public eye while navigating something so vulnerable behind closed doors.

Her experience resonated with many women because it showed that infertility does not discriminate based on fame, success, or status — and that emotional pain around delayed motherhood can affect anyone.