Model, cookbook author and pregnant mother of two Chrissy Teigen said two weeks ago that she had come to realize a terminated pregnancy she called a miscarriage in 2020 was, in fact, an abortion.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said on his podcast Tuesday that she’s wrong.
Speaking at a Sept. 15 summit in Los Angeles, Teigen reportedly told attendees that when her third pregnancy with her Grammy winning husband John Legend went awry, she was forced to make “a lot of difficult and heartbreaking decisions.”
According to the 36-year-old star, one of those decisions meant medically ending a pregnancy neither she nor the child would have survived. At the time, Teigen said that what she went through after 20 weeks of pregnancy was a miscarriage.
But after further consideration, which included discussing with Legend the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June, Teigen reportedly realized the procedure was an abortion.
“Let’s just call it what it was: It was an abortion,” she said to her audience in L.A., according to the Hollywood Reporter.
But in a clip from his podcast “The Cloakroom” that started making the rounds Tuesday, Cruz — who praised the Supreme Court’s ruling in June as “a massive victory for life” — took issue with Teigen’s characterization of her medical experience.
“If there’s a medical procedure in that context, it’s not an abortion,” Cruz said, adding that it should be legal for doctors to “intervene” to save the life of a woman who’s pregnant, even if it means ending a pregnancy.
According to Cruz, Teigen and Legend were right about what they went through before giving it further thought.
“In those circumstances, she may want to characterize it as an abortion in this political context, but she described it at the time as a miscarriage and it certainly sounds like that was an accurate description,” Cruz said.
The Hollywood Reporter said that Teigen confessed in L.A. that when she first went public with news of her ill-fated pregnancy, she “hadn’t made sense” of her experience just yet.
Merriam-Webster defines abortion as “the termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus.”
Following a three-decade decline in abortions nationwide, researchers at the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute found that between 2017 and 2020, abortions were on the rise in the U.S. Roughly one in five pregnancies were terminated across the country, researchers reported in June.
The World Health Organization calls abortion a “common health intervention” that takes place 73 million times annually.
“Lack of access to safe, affordable, timely and respectful abortion care, and the stigma associated with abortion, pose risks to women’s physical and mental well-being throughout the life-course,” WHO reports.
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