Add Bridget Marquardt to the list of celebrities who are opening up about their struggles with fertility. “We are currently doing IVF,” the Girls Next Door alum told Us Weekly on Thursday, May 19, at the Let’s Make a Baby fundraiser gala in Beverly Hills, about her and fiancé Nick Carpenter’s plans to start their family. The 42-year-old, who is now on her second round, is remaining cautiously optimistic. “We’ll see,” she said. “It’s exciting.”
The Let’s Make a Baby event was hosted by the Baby Quest Foundation, an organization that helps families in need finance their infertility procedures.
“I feel like there is a lot of shame and embarrassment and people aren’t really talking about [infertility] as much as they should,” Marquardt told Us. “I feel like if people talked about it more and came out publicly with their struggle, people would realize they aren’t alone…and not feel so awful about things.”
Marquardt froze her eggs when she was 34 and living in the Playboy Mansion with then-boyfriend Hugh Hefner and fellow girlfriends Holly Madison and Kendra Wilkinson. “Holly and Hef were obviously the main relationship,” she told Us in 2011. “We weren’t allowed to date or anything like that. I wanted to have a little bit of insurance and a little extra time.”
Marquardt told Us at the time that she didn’t “feel that clock ticking” and wasn’t “one of those people who’s dying to have kids.”
But five years later, the model is most definitely ready. “I would love to have a girl,” she told Us on Thursday. “But I kind of want one of each. So I’m hoping that maybe two someday.”
When Marquardt and the film director become parents, she suspects he will be the pushover, judging from his relationship with their cat. “I’m the disciplinarian. Nick doesn’t discipline,” she cracked. “The cat can do whatever it wants. It can scratch on the furniture. It can do whatever it wants and Nick doesn’t do anything about it. So I have to yell. I’m the bad cop. He’s the good cop.”
Marquardt and Carpenter began dating in 2008. He proposed in October 2015.
