Adrienne Bailon Spent An INSANE Amount Of Money On IVF Treatments Before Having A Child Via Surrogate

Adrienne Bailon-Houghton went through it trying to get pregnant for over half a decade.

The popular former host of The Real and her husband Israel Houghton welcomed their son Ever James a little less than two years ago via surrogate. But surrogacy was NOT the first option for the 40-year-old actress. In fact, she spent years (and years, and years) trying to get pregnant on her own. She and her husband tried in vain for so long that she dropped some serious coin on in vitro fertilization procedures, too!

On Saturday, People caught up with the longtime TV star at a pop-up shop stop for her brand LA VOÛTE. There, the mag asked about her family planning process before having Ever, who is now 20 months old, via surrogate. Adrienne revealed that she “only” (!) did eight IVF procedures, and also tried intrauterine inseminations (IUIs, like what Lala Kent did) and lots of other things over six years to try to get pregnant:

“I only did eight cycles of IVF, but that doesn’t include the amount of IUIs I did and every other kind of imaginable treatments that you could imagine for fertility. So it was a pretty tough six years of trying to have my son.”

Damn! Talk about exhausting all options. And when the pregnancy still didn’t happen, the Cheetah Girls alum had to turn to surrogacy. Reflecting on the cost of those six years of fertility treatments and other procedures, Bailon told People that it was “easily over a million” dollars in total. Jeez!!! To her credit, she quickly added:

“And that is not realistic for the average person. And I recognize that.”

No kidding!

Interestingly, this is not the first time Adrienne has hinted at serious pregnancy struggles. Back in 2018 on an episode of The Real, she opened up about how difficult it had been for her to get pregnant at the time. Based on the timeline, that would have been three-ish years into her six-year odyssey of trying to conceive. During that past daytime ep, she told her co-hosts and the viewers:

“I think that as an audience we should be sensitive to the fact that everybody doesn’t get pregnant right away. I think for myself I thought it would happen so easily for me and it just hasn’t happened that way. I’ve had to come to peace with that it’ll happen when it’s God’s timing and I believe in that and I have faith in all of that, but it can be really discouraging and it can be really frustrating.”

But thankfully, surrogacy was a viable option after all that, and it all worked out in the end! Nearly two full years into Ever James’ life, mom, dad, and baby are happy as can be together!