Content warning: pregnancy loss
Victoria's Secret model Taylor Hill has revealed publicly for the first time that she suffered a pregnancy loss about three years ago, while she was engaged to husband Daniel Fryer.
Hill decided to speak about it with Jay Shetty for a conversation on his On Purpose podcast, explaining that revealing this vulnerable experience is a way for her to honor her dog Tate, who sadly passed away from cancer last year, and who was there for her while she was going through this.
"In grieving his loss, I'm grieving the shared experiences we've had and learning how to cope with something without him, when he was there for me through that time in my life," she explained.
Hill went on to recount her experience of pregnancy loss. "It was a really strange circumstance under which I had my miscarriage," she said. "I had an IUD. I had it for about three years, so I wasn't actively trying to get pregnant, I didn't want to get pregnant at all. I was engaged to my husband, and we were not planning on starting a family probably for a while. I wasn't in the headspace at all to be pregnant."
Speaking of getting pregnant while on an IUD, which happens in fewer than 1 percent of cases according to WebMD, Hill said that she didn't "understand" it.
"Crazy things happen to someone, and it's like, 'That'll never happen to me,'" she said. "It happened to me, I got pregnant on an IUD, and I was shocked. I was sad. I didn't want to be pregnant, I wasn't ready to be pregnant. I didn't understand what it meant to be pregnant with an IUD. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know what my journey with this pregnancy would look like. I was so scared. I was terrified."
Fryer wasn't able to travel to the U.S. to be with Hill because he's British and COVID travel restrictions were in place, so he wasn't there when she found out. At this stage, she relied heavily on the comfort Tate provided.
When she went to the doctor, they told her that the pregnancy was, in her words, "50/50 of whether or not you're gonna carry this out," because of the environment created by the IUD.
While she was scared to have a child at that stage in her life, she also knew that she was going to marry someone she wanted to have a family with, so she eventually put herself in a mental space where she accepted that if the pregnancy "stuck around" she would have a child.
But at around 10 weeks, "I start seeing what looks like fresh blood, and that's what [the doctor] told me to look out for, and that's kind of the early signs of what ultimately will be a miscarriage."
She continued, becoming emotional, "That starts happening, and I'm alone in my house. At least I have Tate with me, and I call my husband, just devastated because I know this is about to happen to me, and we're both crying and he was so heartbroken that he couldn't be there. That was really painful for him too, for both of us."
Hill explained as she wiped her tears that since this was the first time she was speaking about this publicly, it was as if she was "processing" it all again.
She went on to share how she dealt with the experience emotionally, including the internal conflict she felt between not feeling ready to be a mother and feeling intense grief that she wasn't. Ultimately, she said that she found some comfort in part in knowing that she wasn't alone in this experience—unfortunately, between 10 and 20 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to March of Dimes.
