Sara Bareilles is being brave about a difficult time in her life.
The “Love Song” singer spoke candidly about her and husband Joe Tippett’s fertility struggles in her upcoming documentary Good Grief that premiered at the Tribeca Festival June 4. The documentary chronicles the making of Sara’s upcoming album of the same name—her first in seven years.
"I'm in the same boat," Sara told one of her collaborators in the doc who had been struggling with fertility issues, according to People. "We've been trying for two years."
The 46-year-old then became emotional as she said that she and Joe had tried in vitro fertilization (IVF) “a few times.”
"But I think the next phase is egg donor," Sara explained. "For some reason, I'm not making the appointment. I really had to grieve that...that it won't be mine."
The Grammy winner said she had been doing a lot of "meditating around the size of love,” saying she was focusing on, “The idea that love is just big enough to hold a lot of shapes and sizes and ways things come.”
She added, “The idea that I could only love a child if it shows up in this one way.”
Sara’s admission just days after she announced the title of her album Good Grief on Instagram June 3, writing that the record is “a love letter to the hardest chapter of my life.”
“I’m so grateful to every loving person who held the weight of this time with me, and for me, when I couldn’t hold it myself,” she continued. “And to all of you… thank you for waiting. I am grateful for YOU. I am more of who I am meant to be because of this very tender, very soulful, very good grief.”
Thankfully, throughout her journey Sara has had husband Joe by her side. The two first met in 2015 when he auditioned for her musical Waitress. They got engaged in 2022 and married during an intimate ceremony in 2025.
“The best adventure of my lifetime began when Joe Tippett showed up,” Sara wrote on Instagram in March for his birthday. “Happy birthday to the man who cracked open a universe I was already in love with showed me there was so much more to love.”
“He walked with me into corners of myself that I was too scared to discover alone. Everything is better with you, my love, and we’re just getting started,” she said. “I love you, @joetipps, you’re stuck with me forever you ding dong.”
For more stars who have been open about their own fertility journeys, keep reading.
The Duck Dynasty star and husband Jacob Mayo have been open about why it’s important for them to give insight into their fertility struggles on her family’s new reality series.
“We share the story of infertility in the show and that’s something that we haven’t really shared publicly that much, but that’s something that others just don’t know.” Bella said in a joint May 2025 interview with Jacob for Us Weekly. “When you just look at someone on social media, you can’t know what anyone’s going through.”
For them, it not only “felt right” but allowed the pair to be their “authentic selves on this new show.”
Two years before the former Miss Universe and Christian McCaffrey shared they were expecting their first baby, she detailed how her endometriosis diagnosis may lead to future fertility issues.
“I want to have kids, but I want to make sure that I can,” Culpo, who was diagnosed with the disease in 2020 and subsequently had surgery to treat it, shared in a November 2022 episode of The Culpo Sisters. “It could be really hard for me to have babies.”
“Endometriosis can affect your fertility in a lot of different ways,” she continued. “You can have endometrial tissue growing near or on your ovaries, it can affect the quality of your eggs, scar your fallopian tubes.”
Bachelor Nation's Caelynn shared a candid message about her and husband Dean Bell’s difficulty conceiving in the years since their 2023 wedding.
“It’s hard,” Caelynn explained in a March 2025 YouTube video. “I’m putting way less pressure on myself than I was in the first few months of trying.”
Although the process has been emotionally challenging, Caelynn is remaining positive as she and her husband get medically tested to “figure out what’s going on.”
The wife of country musician Jelly Roll has been vocal about her in vitro fertilization (IVF) journey since June 2024.
"We had planned on doing this privately," she wrote on Instagram, "but decided our IVF journey needed to be shared because we've always been so open.”
Since then, she has detailed "the emotions, the roller coaster, the worry," of the medical process on her Dumb Blonde podcast.
Despite the challenges, though, she is open to other options to grow her family.
“It is tough, but at the same time it’s like, you just put it in God’s hands,” she said on a November 2025 episode of her podcast. “If it’s meant to be it’s meant to be. And if not, we can always adopt.”
The Dancing With the Stars cohost has been open about her struggles with endometriosis, a female reproductive disease, and has been working to preserve her fertility for when she feels ready to try and have a baby.
In June 2025, she shared that she froze her eggs for the third time.
Since welcoming Sonny with husband Tim Rosenman in 2017, the Hills alum has been candid about the ups and downs of her fertility journey, including her two pregnancy losses and her surrogate’s two miscarriages.
In July 2024, Whitney confirmed she’s preparing for a second egg retrieval.
"I'm feeling definitely better than my last round because I know a little bit more what to expect," she shared, "and I just have so much trust and faith in my doctor."
But no matter what happens in their journey to welcome a second child, Whitney has been clear there is nothing lacking in her family of three.
"Especially now, as we embark on this fertility journey for number two, I know we are complete no matter what," she wrote as part of a birthday tribute to her son on his 7th birthday in July 2024. "You are a blessing. We love watching you grow and are beyond grateful for how chill you are."
The Everything Everywhere All At Once star—who married Jean Todt in 2023 after a 19-year engagement—once opened up about the challenges she experienced trying to conceive with her first husband, Dickson Poon.
"I always wanted to have children," Michelle shared during a podcast appearance in November 2024. "I went and did fertility [treatments] to aid in the process. I think that's the worst moment to go through is every month. You feel like such a failure."
She continued, "At some point, you stop blaming yourself. There are certain things in your body that don't function in a certain way. That's how it is. You just have to let go and move on."
The rapper, who shares son Wilde with husband Maximillion Cooper, once detailed a heartbreaking pregnancy loss she experienced due to an ectopic pregnancy while filming her sitcom Eve.
"It was 2006 when I found out that I was pregnant," Eve wrote in her memoir Who's That Girl?. "I had to have emergency surgery and stop filming the show for two weeks. I don't know why I lied to everyone on set and said that my appendix had ruptured, really. Maybe because I was lying to myself."
"If I faced losing my baby, then I didn't know if two weeks would be enough emotional healing time," she continued. "In the end, it was barely enough healing time for me physically, before I was right back to work on set. I had lost so much weight after the surgery, and my body was so frail."
The Selling Sunset star, who welcomed her son Austin at the age of 15, has been candid about her and husband Romain Bonnet's fertility journey.
“We don't know what the outcome is going to be,” she told E! News in September 2024. “We're just kind of taking it as it as it comes. I've been super busy right now with the book and with the season and everything. So, I know nothing's going to happen if I'm stressed out and if I'm running around.”
And in addition to undergoing a surgery to rectify a septate uterus (when the uterus is divided into two parts by a membrane), Mary said she and Romain aren't rushing into any decisions—and are happy with their dog.
“We have our fur baby though, Thor. Romaine is obsessed with him,” added the real estate agent. “So if it doesn't happen, he says he's OK. He’s got his little fur baby, and he is just beyond obsessed. We’ll be OK. What's meant to be will be.”
The NFL sportscaster and her husband Jarret Stoll, who welcomed son Mack in July 2023, have had their own fair share of ups and downs amid their journey to parenthood—including navigating Erin's cervical cancer diagnosis in 2017.
But having frozen her eggs before her cancer battle, she then underwent IVF to help her conceive a child—an experience she decided to share with the world.
"I just was so tired of keeping quiet," she explained of sharing her struggles in a 2021 essay. "It was such a hard, painful journey. I think I went numb through most of it, because you just feel like a robot and you're on this really unfair roller coaster that more times out of none, you're going to get really bad news."
She added, "I'm a vocal person, and I could speak from the heart and just talk about how crappy it was and that I get it for a lot of couples and families that are trying to have a child."