Kim Kardashian was not expecting to conceive her first baby with Kanye West in the early days of their relationship.
“And then seven months into dating Kanye, I got pregnant,” Kardashian, 45, explained in an excerpt from Jonathan Van Meter’s upcoming biography, Citizen Kim, shared with New York Magazine’s The Cut on Tuesday, October 13. “We hadn’t even had a first real fight until I was pregnant.”
Kim said she had stopped taking birth control after going to a fertility clinic with sister Khloé Kardashian, who was trying to have a baby with her now-ex-husband, Lamar Odom.
“And I was like, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get all my blood tests with you so it won’t be scary.’ And we did it together. And then the results came back: ‘Khloé, you’re fine. But Kim? You have some problems,’” Kim recalled.
At the time, fertility experts told Kim that she didn’t have many eggs left and recommended she stop taking the pill since getting pregnant may be difficult for her.
“I never had a pregnancy scare or anything in my life,” Kim said, “so I just went to Miami without birth control and got pregnant that first month. I was like, ‘F***.’ I literally thought my life was over.”
Kim, who was hysterical at the time, then called West to tell him the news.
“I was crying so hard I couldn’t get it out,” she said. “He thought a family member of mine had died. I was [weeping]. … He was like, ‘What’s happening?’ And I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m pregnant.’ It came so out of left field for me; I was shocked. I don’t know why I was so shocked. Come on. But when the doctors tell you, ‘I don’t think you’ll ever get pregnant, you have the uterus of a 50-year-old, you’re going to have to do all this IVF.’”
As Kim grappled with the decision of whether to keep the pregnancy, she decided it was solely her choice to make and told West, “I need a week. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I don’t want to talk to you. I need some time to think.”
By the end of the week, she knew her decision. “OK, let’s move forward and let’s have a baby,” she said.
Kim welcomed the couple’s eldest daughter, North, in 2013 after a difficult pregnancy.
“I had a rough time from the start and a few scares,” she said. “I thought I miscarried. I was bleeding a lot. At about six months, I thought I was going into labor, and then I ended up giving birth about five and a half weeks early.”
Kim had preeclampsia and placenta accreta. “I think when you’re in it, you just kind of roll with it,” she said. “And, you know, it was obviously the best thing I ever did.”
The pair went on to welcome son Saint in 2015. Daughter Chicago and son Psalm were born via surrogate in 2018 and 2019, respectively. In 2021, Kim filed for divorce from West. Their separation was finalized one year later.
