Oprah Winfrey on Getting Pregnant After Being Raped By A Family Member At 14: “I Wouldn’t Have Been a Good Mom for Babies”

In 1968, at the age of 14, Oprah Winfrey gave birth to a premature baby boy who died in the hospital weeks later. For years, the media mogul withheld her story to protect herself from the judgment of others. However, when the news broke in 1990 of her pregnancy and subsequent loss, after the initial feeling of devastation and betrayal, Winfrey finally felt free.

Now, almost 50 years since giving birth after having been raped by a family member, Winfrey reveals that she’s completely okay with the fact that she doesn’t have any children of her own.

“I didn’t want babies. I wouldn’t have been a good mom for babies,” Winfrey said in the April Issue of Good Housekeeping U.K. “I don’t have the patience. I have the patience for puppies, but that’s a quick stage!”

Instead, Winfrey says she already a mother figure to the “world’s children” in her Leadership Academy boarding school in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“When people were pressuring me to get married and have children, I knew I was not going to be a person that ever regretted not having them because I feel like I am a mother to the world’s children,” she said. “Love knows no boundaries. It doesn’t matter if a child came from your womb or if you found that person at age two, 10 or 20. If the love is real, the caring is pure and it comes from a good space, it works.”

“It is more rewarding than I would ever have imagined,” Winfrey said of the school. “I was doing this to help them, but it has brought a light to my life that I can’t explain,” she added.