Opinion | Mélanie Joly opens up about her miscarriage — and why she hasn’t given up on getting pregnant

For Mélanie Joly, the year 2022 felt more like 10 years.

Joly was still getting used to her new job as Canada’s foreign affairs minister early in the year when Russia started its illegal war with Ukraine. That crisis, on top of everything else on the global agenda, has taken her to 28 countries in 12 months, including six visits to Germany and three to Indonesia.

But Joly also started 2022 amid a searing, personal disappointment she hasn’t disclosed publicly until now: over the holidays last year, she suffered a miscarriage. Her dreams of becoming a new mother, which she shared with the Star in the spring of 2021, came crashing down in a Montreal emergency room just days before Christmas.

If that wasn’t enough, that trip to the hospital landed her husband, Félix Marzell, with a case of COVID-19, which Joly then caught while she was still recovering at home from the miscarriage.

“So the entire Christmas season was catastrophic,” Joly said. “I really felt that the last year was the equivalent of a decade.”

Joly said she has decided to open up about this pregnancy loss for the same reason she chose to go public about her in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments — to tell other women going through the same that they’re not alone.

“I think it’s important to talk about this,” she said. Ever since she came forward with her story about trying to become a mother in her early 40s, Joly said she’s heard from lots of women sharing their struggles and losses, too.

“There’s a network that just is generated through these different stories … I think it’s important because it’s a bit of a taboo — miscarriages and fertility.”

Within a few weeks of the miscarriage last Christmas, and on her 43rd birthday in January, Joly found herself on a plane headed to Ukraine, where the threat of a Russian invasion was looming. She has looked back at the photos of herself from that trip and is struck by how pale she was. But she also knew she had to get back to work.

“I had to prepare for my first crisis,” she said. “I knew my first crisis would define my work as foreign minister.”

Joly was aware her appointment to this major post in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet surprised many people, and that many critics believed she was out of her depth. This, she said, is still part of the job of being a woman in politics, no matter what your age.

“I don’t think people saw me as the obvious candidate when I became minister of foreign affairs,” she said.

I reminded Joly of the withering criticism she faced when she said this year that Canada was a “convening” power in the world. For some, this was tantamount to saying the country lacked clout, and a dismissal of this nation — in the same way women are often dismissed in the workplace — as weak and relationship-focused.

“Politics is a lot about the psychological battle. It is how you deal with your own vulnerabilities, and how you can relate to folks out there,” she said. “For me, there’s a line between standing up against misogyny while working on my own resilience — (about) how can you deal with criticism, and how you can actually take that energy and deploy it in a way that is actually feeding you and making you a better person.”

When I interviewed Joly in this same office at the top of the Lester B. Pearson building a little more than a year ago, she was still new to the job. She was getting ready for her first meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has since become a good friend. So too is German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.

Blinken and several other of Joly’s counterparts around the world are fully in the loop on how the Canadian foreign minister has been trying to juggle her job and her hopes to have a child.

Blinken is serving as a particularly good listening post. His own wife, Evan Ryan, now the White House cabinet secretary, went public a couple of years ago with her fertility issues and her ultimate decision to have children through surrogates. Blinken, 60, and Ryan, 52, are now the parents to toddlers aged two and three.

And yes, Joly is still going through the fertility treatments, though it means that sometimes she’s had to have medical followups in far-flung places, such as Vietnam last April.

“So imagine — I arrive at a medical clinic to do this scan,” she said. “We’re in Vietnam, and the doctor is Ukrainian.”

The doctor was a young woman, Joly said, who was extremely angry about what was happening in her country. Her hands were shaking as she did the scan on the minister. Twice since her miscarriage, Joly has had embryo-transfer procedures as part of the ongoing in vitro fertilization treatment regime. Neither transfer has worked out. But she’s not giving up.

Joly knows she’s taking a risk — again — talking openly about such an intensely personal issue as a miscarriage. There will be people, she knows, who will argue that women in high-profile roles should not be drawing attention to their personal lives and relationships, and that a demanding job requires a single-minded focus on career only.

“That’s also one of the reasons I’m talking about IVF. Yeah, I know it’s a very feminine issue. Of course it is. But it is a taboo because it is a feminine issue, right?” There’s also guilt, she said — a sense that a miscarriage isn’t just a loss, but a failure of some type.

“Why should we feel guilty if we go through a miscarriage? It’s sad. It’s difficult. But guilt is not necessary.”

In the political rumour mill, Joly’s name is often raised as one of the cabinet ministers who would one day vie for Justin Trudeau’s job. The prime minister has made clear he’s sticking around for the next election, but still, I decided to ask Joly whether leadership is also part of her long-range plans.

“We started this conversation talking about IVF,” Joly replied. “The question of children is still on the table — and that will influence a lot.”

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