Model Chrissy Teigen has revealed a miscarriage that she publicly spoke about two years ago was actually an abortion, but she has only recently come to realise that.
Teigen and her husband, singer John Legend, lost their son Jack at 20 weeks as a result of a pregnancy complication and were open about the heartbreaking experience at the time.
But Teigen has told a conference that she now accepts it was “an abortion to save my life for a baby that had absolutely no chance”, but it took years to reach that realisation, media are reporting.
She was speaking at a session at the A Day of Unreasonable Conversation summit in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe vs Wade, which has blocked access to abortion.
“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.”
The TV personality said it was her husband who actually helped her face the truth while they were talking about the changes to abortion law in America.
During their discussion, Teigen was sympathising with other people who have to make the decision to terminate a pregnancy when Legend pointed out that she was one of those people.
“I fell silent, feeling weird that I hadn’t made sense of it that way,” Teigen said.
“I told the world we had a miscarriage, the world agreed we had a miscarriage, all the headlines said it was a miscarriage.
“And 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.”
After the loss of her son in 2020, Teigen shared raw photos from her hospital bedside and described it at the time as a pregnancy complication.
But she now explains that she had to make the “difficult and heartbreaking” decision after doctors told her the baby would not survive.
“It became very clear around halfway through that he would not survive, and that I wouldn’t either without any medical intervention,” Teigen said.
Weeks after losing her child, Teigen wrote a blog explaining that she had been diagnosed with partial placental abruption which is when the placenta starts to separate from the womb.
“We monitored it very closely, hoping for things to heal and stop. In bed, I bled and bled, lightly but all day, changing my own diapers every couple of hours when the blood got uncomfortable to lay in,” she wrote in October 2020.
Eventually, the doctor told her “exactly what I knew was coming — it was time to say goodbye”.
“He just wouldn’t survive this, and if it went on any longer, I might not either,” she wrote at the time.
“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.”
Teigen is now pregnant again. The couple has two other surviving children aged six and four.
