In her book We're Going to Need More Wine [1], Gabrielle Union opened up about her infertility struggles [2] and shared that she's had "eight or nine miscarriages" [3] throughout her marriage with Dwyane Wade. The revelation that those losses meant something more than the fact that she was trying to conceive in her early 40s led Gabrielle to speak more candidly about her fertility journey, and she's continuing to do so now.

"Fertility is not an older women issue, it is an issue period," she said during the 2018 BlogHer conference [4] in New York City. "Towards the end of my fertility journey, I finally got some answers, because everyone had just sort of chalked it up to 'You're a career woman, you've prioritized your career, you waiting too long and now you're just too old to have a kid. And that's on you for wanting a career.'"

It turns out Gabrielle has been diagnosed with a condition called adenomyosis. "There is nothing you can do about adenomyosis. The gag is that I had adenomyosis in my early 20s," she said.

Doctors don't know the exact cause of adenomyosis, but according to the Mayo Clinic, the condition occurs "when the tissue that normally lines the uterus [5] grows into the muscular wall of the uterus . . . An enlarged uterus and painful, heavy periods can result." Adenomyosis is considered to be a form of endometriosis [6], which can often result in infertility.