Dwyane Wade speaks about his wife Gabrielle Union‘s miscarriages in his newly released ESPN documentary “D. Wade: Life Unexpected,” with Wade saying he feared for his spouse’s life.
“I’m watching my wife go through a lot physically,” he recalled. “You’re sitting in with the doctors and they’re like, ‘You can do this and that but the risk of you surviving.’ It became a point where I was like, ‘Oh wait, now I might lose you in this process?’”
But Wade said he began to think of other ways that he and his wife could have a child together.
“There’s not only one way to have your family,” he stated. “We started having conversations and we were like, ‘What are the other options?’ And the other became surrogacy.”
Union, who said she had at least eight miscarriages in her 2017 book “We’re Going to Need More Wine” also spoke about that difficult time period.
“When Dwyane and I started trying, we were so excited,” she remembered. “So there were a ton of pregnancies and positive test results and then poof. Usually around the 6-8 week mark, gone. Obviously, I knew it was not him and it literally just stayed like that for years. I just almost started expecting defeat.”
Union also said that she had some trepidation about using a surrogate but then became open to it.
“My immediate thing was, even if I go through with a surrogate, I don’t get to be a ‘real mom,’” she thought at one time. “It just took a long time to just be like, ‘Let’s go for it, let’s try.’”
The couple welcomed their daughter Kaavia James Wade on Nov. 7, 2018, through a surrogate.
Wade has three other children, two with his ex-wife Siohvaughn Funches and one with Aja Metoyer of “Basketball Wives” fame. He’s also raising his sister Deanna’s son, while Kaavia is Union’s first child.
Union and Wade got married on August 30, 2014 in Miami, Fla.