Back in October 2020, Chrissy Teigen and her husband, John Legend, announced that they’d lost their third child at 20 weeks following pregnancy complications.
Chrissy initially told her Instagram followers that she’d been hospitalized after experiencing a month of excessive bleeding.
“I’m about halfway through pregnancy, and the blood has been going on for like a month… Yeah, it is scary, but it’s scary in the way that there’s nothing you can do,” she said in a video shared to her story.
Weeks later, she shared a heartbreaking Instagram post announcing their pregnancy loss, while revealing that they’d already named the baby Jack.
“We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before. We were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed, despite bags and bags of blood transfusions. It just wasn’t enough,” Chrissy wrote.
“To our Jack – I’m so sorry that the first few moments of your life were met with so many complications, that we couldn’t give you the home you needed to survive,” she continued.
Several weeks later, Chrissy wrote a blog post explaining that she had been induced to deliver Jack at 20 weeks after being diagnosed with partial placental abruption. This is when the placenta begins to come away from the inside of the womb.
“After a couple nights at the hospital, my doctor told me exactly what I knew was coming — it was time to say goodbye,” she wrote. “He just wouldn’t survive this, and if it went on any longer, I might not either. We had tried bags and bags of blood transfusions, every single one going right through me like we hadn’t done anything at all. Late one night, I was told it would be time to let go in the morning.”
Chrissy added that she slowly came “to terms” with what would happen, writing: “I would have an epidural and be induced to deliver our 20 week old, a boy that would have never survived in my belly.”
Last month, Chrissy — who shares 6-year-old Luna and 4-year-old Miles with John — revealed that she’s pregnant again, nearly two years after losing Jack.
“the last few years have been a blur of emotions to say the least, but joy has filled our home and hearts again. 1 billion shots later (in the leg lately, as u can see!) we have another on the way,” she wrote on Instagram alongside a photo of herself flaunting her baby bump.
And Chrissy has continued to share regular updates on her current pregnancy, posting several candid photos of her stomach to her Instagram page over the past weeks.
But reflecting on her past pregnancy loss earlier this week, Chrissy spoke out about the difficult experience at length during a speech at social impact agency Propper Daley’s Day of Unreasonable Conversation program on Thursday.
“Two years ago, when I was pregnant with Jack… I had to make a lot of difficult and heartbreaking decisions,” she said, per The Hollywood Reporter.
“It became very clear around halfway through that he would not survive, and that I wouldn’t either without any medical intervention,” she divulged.
Chrissy went on to reveal that she’s now realized that she had a medical induction abortion, not a miscarriage, though didn’t understand until this year. These abortions are mainly used after 16 weeks of pregnancy, using medication to induce labor and delivery in pregnancies with birth defects or complications.
“Let’s just call it what it was: It was an abortion,” she said. “An abortion to save my life for a baby that had absolutely no chance. And to be honest, I never, ever put that together until, actually, a few months ago.”
Chrissy purportedly went on to note that she only understood she’d had an abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer, and that John had been the one to help her make sense of it.
Chrissy said that after telling John she felt sympathy towards those who’ve had an abortion and the emotional decision behind it, he explained to her that she too was one of those people.
“I fell silent, feeling weird that I hadn’t made sense of it that way,” she said. “I told the world we had a miscarriage, the world agreed we had a miscarriage, all the headlines said it was a miscarriage.”
Chrissy revealed she felt really “frustrated” and “silly” that it had taken her “over a year” to make the connection.
“I became really frustrated that I didn’t, in the first place, say what it was, and I felt silly that it had taken me over a year to actually understand that we had had an abortion,” she shared.
