How realistic is the Kardashian pregnancy 'konspiracy'?
Just how far will the Kardashians go to stay in the headlines? That’s a current debate among Kardashian “konspiracy theorists” who are suspicious about how the family’s triple baby news aligns with Season 10 of their E! reality show.
We ended the month of September with the news that not one, not two, but three Kardashian-Jenner girls had babies on the way. First, rumors swirled that Kim, 36, and Kanye West were expecting their third child via surrogate early next year. Then, two more bombshells dropped: It was reported that Kylie, 20, was expecting her first child with boyfriend, rapper Travis Scott, and Khloé, 33, also had a baby on the way with her basketball beau, Tristan Thompson.
So far, Kim is the only one who has confirmed anything — although sources tell Yahoo Lifestyle it’s true that both Khloé and Kylie are pregnant.
The internet had a field day speculating that momager Kris Jenner orchestrated the pregnancies to coincide with the new season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. But while the funny memes have passed, the suspicion for some is still there. She didn’t actually orchestrate anything … right?!
As detailed by Vox, the theory goes something like this: Back in 2014, the website Blind Gossip posted an item suggesting a certain TV maven was “trying to get the cast on this show excited about a new story line in which three of the women on the show … all pregnant … at the same time!” Fast forward to September 2017, and here we are.
Although Kim is the only one who has confirmed the happy news — on a super teaser for the new season, mind you — we suspect the other sisters won’t stay mum too much longer as they tend to like to release bombshell news on their show.
But the question remains: How likely is it that Mama Jenner conspired to create three pregnancies timed with the show’s 10th anniversary? Don’t worry, we’ve investigated.
A post shared by Kim Kardashian West (@kimkardashian) on Sep 3, 2017 at 2:55pm PDT
“I think the most common misconceptions is that pregnancy is something you can control,” Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a fertility expert and reproductive endocrinologist based in San Francisco, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “Like you saw with Khloé, she went to a fertility clinic with Lamar Odom, and she was open about how she has polycystic ovary syndrome, which can make it more difficult to get pregnant. Then there’s Kim, who was working separately with a surrogate … so to think the triple pregnancy was some kind of mastermind by the head of the Kardashian family, it’s a nice theory. But no. It’s not that easy.”
Eyvazzadeh, who isn’t treating any of the Kardashians, does think it’s realistic to assume the timing of the announcement was manipulated — after all, it seemed like mere moments after Kim talked about having a surrogate, the announcement came that she was pregnant. “It’s possible they announced everything closer together for the effect they’re trying to get,” she says.
But while it seems unlikely that the pregnancies were orchestrated, Diane Tober, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco Institute for Health and Aging, says it’s possible with some intensive planning.
“It could very easily be done using fertility medications, hypothetically speaking,” Tober tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “If they are all getting pregnant through in vitro fertilization rather than through sexual intercourse, they could potentially time their cycles to coincide. The way this could be done is through fertility medications, first using birth control/oral contraceptives to get control over the timing of the menstrual cycle, then start using injectable fertility drugs to control when ovulation occurs, stimulate ovaries to produce more eggs, and then surgically extract the eggs, fertilize them with partner’s sperm, and then implant the embryo(s). We know Kim is already using a surrogate, so her cycle — or a donor’s, if they used an egg donor — would already be timed to sync with the surrogate. If they’re using fertility treatments with Kim, they all know how it works, I’m sure.”
Tober, who is also not treating the Kardashians, says that once two or more women have synced up their menstrual cycles using birth control, they can then follow up with drugs that can make them more fertile during ovulation. And syncing cycles isn’t difficult. Tober, who is currently doing research with egg donors and working on a documentary film called The Perfect Donor about the process, says that this aspect of the process is fairly quick.
“Egg donors go through it all the time, and it really only takes a matter of a month or less on birth control to sync up with the intended parent, and then she and the intended parent are good to go,” Tober explains. “It can happen in a short period of time – less than a couple of months. It’s basically taking the control of the woman’s natural cycle away medically, and then syncing control of the cycle so two women can line up and be matched at the same time.”
Which means, Tober notes, that the Kardashians definitely didn’t need three years to pull off this plan. But Eyvazzadeh wants to remind everyone that getting pregnant isn’t that simple.
“If only getting pregnant were that easy,” she exclaims. “People don’t realize until they’re actually trying how hard it is to get pregnant. Each ovulation has a 15 percent pregnancy rate, even in a woman’s late 20s and early 30s. Human beings aren’t cats, bunnies or mice.”
Eyvazzadeh continues: “Let’s say you have Kylie. Her pregnancy rate from IVF is probably 90 percent because of her age. Then Khloé’s rate is more like 75 percent. But still, even women like that working through ovulation and medication, to get them to ovulate on the same day, you’re still dealing with human biology and a low pregnancy rate. Everyone’s ovulation is different. Everyone ovulates on a different day, and you’re not going to ovulate on the same exact day as your sister.”
And as Tober points out, infertility is a serious issue for many women looking to get pregnant. “Many, many people have problems conceiving,” she says. “Especially as people are looking to get pregnant and reproduce later in life, the mother could be facing natural fertility declines with age.”
Still, both agree the timing of it all is interesting.
“I don’t know what their sex life is like, but it’s very unusual for three sisters to be pregnant at the exact same time,” Tober says. “It could’ve been chance, but it seems like there’s a little more planning to it.”
“They all look to me to be at different stages,” Eyvazzadeh adds. “But there’s no such thing as a sister fertility theory, where being around your sister a lot means you sync up your pregnancies. My sister and I were pregnant at the same time, but we were eight months apart.”
So while we may not have the definitive answer on whether or not Kris Jenner is a fertility wizard — at least, not until she admits as much on an episode of her reality show — one thing’s for sure: If it’s true, she may have a lucrative fallback career.
Says Eyvazzadeh, “For Kris to pull this off, she would have to be God. If she did that, I want to know what hocus-pocus she’s got going on, because I want to offer that to my patients. That’s pretty amazing.”
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