Gabby Giffords Dreamed of Becoming a Mother
The cover of ?Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope.? Image by Scribner
In the months before she was shot in the head and critically wounded, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, had been undergoing fertility treatment with hopes of becoming pregnant via in vitro fertilization. That’s one of the revelations in “Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope,” the new memoir that the Democratic congresswoman wrote with her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, and veteran journalist (and former Bintel Brief guest columnist) Jeffrey Zaslow.
To coincide with the book’s release, Giffords, who in 2007 became Arizona’s first Jewish congresswoman, granted her first interview since the shooting to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer; it airs tonight at 10/9 Central, and a preview can be seen here.
Whether or not the three-term congresswoman will realize her dream of becoming a mother remains to be seen. The couple has two frozen embryos in storage at Walter Reed Naval Medical Center. In “Gabby,” an exclusive excerpt of which was published in this week’s People magazine, Kelly writes that it is “still possible for us to have a child together, though given Gabby’s injuries, we’d probably need to go through a surrogate.”
For now, according to the excerpt, Giffords focus isn’t on having a baby or on her political future; it’s on getting better.
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