Minnie Driver Opened Up About Being Told She Was 'Barren' Before Getting Pregnant at 37

Minnie Driver has opened up about her surprise pregnancy 15 years after the experience. The 52-year-old actress revealed on Shazi Visram's podcast, The Healthy Baby Show, that a doctor told her she was "barren" at 18. After spending most of her adult life believing pregnancy was just not in the cards for her, Driver did in fact have a child, and she's not the only person to have this experience. (

"He compared my uterus to the U-bend in a toilet, and was like, 'nothing's getting through there, you won't be having children,'" said Driver on the podcast.

Believing the doctor, Driver didn't think there was any risk of an unplanned pregnancy. "And then when I was 37, I woke up on January the first with the flu, and I was so bummed," she said. "I'd just recently broken up with someone who was nice but wasn't my partner. I didn't have kids, I didn't have a job," adding, "And then I found out I was pregnant."

Fertility issues are incredibly common; One in five heterosexual women aged 15 to 49 "are unable to get pregnant after one year of trying," while one in four "have difficulty getting pregnant or carrying a pregnancy to term," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. At the same time, fertility issues don't necessarily mean that someone can never become pregnant. A 2012 study published in the journal of Fertility and Sterility found that 40 percent of women aged 28 to 36 who had a history of infertility could give birth without treatment — meaning that that were "subfertile rather than infertile."

Driver gave birth to a son named Henry in 2008 when she was 38 years old, and for many years the Minnie Questions podcast host raised her son as a single mom. "There's no amount of hassle that could be bigger than my love for Henry and the hilarity and joy that he has brought into my life," she told Hello! in 2009.

Driver's experience isn't unheard of. The reality is that people with uteruses are sometimes told that they can't have children, and there is always a percentage that still end up giving birth. If you google the term "miracle baby," you'll be inundated with stories of children born to supposedly infertile parents.

Even Driver called the moment when it dawned on her that she was truly expecting a baby after all those years of believing she couldn't "a miracle." She told Visram, "I always loved an adventure, and here was this great, late-stage adventure. So I just went on it."

Stories like Driver's are a reminder that everyone's journey to pregnancy and experiences with fertility are different. It may not play out the way you expect it to.