bitchy | Chrissy Teigen: When I lost Jack in 2020, it was technically an abortion

In 2020, Chrissy Teigen found herself pregnant. It was a surprise to her – she had a lot of trouble conceiving naturally, so her first two children were conceived using IVF, and this one was an “accident,” unplanned but not unwanted. She desperately wanted it, and the pregnancy was difficult from the start. Then, in late September, Chrissy lost the pregnancy and the baby she and John Legend had already named Jack. The word they used at the time was miscarriage and all we knew was that there were so many complications and Jack couldn’t be saved. Now, two years later, Chrissy spoke about what actually happened and why it was technically an abortion to save her life.

Chrissy Teigen confessed Thursday that the miscarriage she said she had two years ago was actually an abortion — which came as a surprise to her. Teigen and husband John Legend had revealed that in September 2020 they lost their son Jack at 20 weeks as a result of a pregnancy complication. At the time, they said it was a miscarriage.

Speaking at social impact agency Propper Daley’s “A Day of Unreasonable Conversation” summit, which was held Thursday, Teigen said the revelation that it was in fact an abortion came as a shock to her.

“Two years ago, when I was pregnant with Jack, John and my third child, I had to make a lot of difficult and heartbreaking decisions. It became very clear around halfway through that he would not survive, and that I wouldn’t either without any medical intervention,” she said. Teigen, who shares Luna, 6, and Miles, 4, with Legend and is currently pregnant, noted she had great medical care and loving friends and family supporting her. She was also grateful for strangers who showed their support after the couple went public with the news.

She went on, discussing her miscarriage, before stopping herself. “Let’s just call it what it was: It was an abortion,” the star 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.”

Teigen said she came to the realization after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer. She expressed to Legend that she felt sympathy toward people who have an abortion and the circumstances they had to go through and the emotional decision “they” had to make, when Legend made her realize that she was in fact one of those people.

“I fell silent, feeling weird that I hadn’t made sense of it that way,” Teigen shared. “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.”

[From THR]

The language around abortion, reproductive issues and miscarriages is already co-opted by political parties too often, and I’d like to offer a delicate solution for this situation. What it sounds like is… both a miscarriage AND an abortion. Jack wasn’t viable. The pregnancy would have killed her. She was already bleeding and losing Jack, and the doctors were clearly worried that Chrissy was going to die. She lost a baby. While I’m not a Teigen fan, I have complete compassion for her on this, and I appreciate that she’s talking about it this way. Abortion is health care, everything around pregnancies, miscarriages and abortion is health care. Of course, the worst MAGA garbage-monsters are attacking her for this. I don’t want to even give those pieces of sh-t a platform.

I told you all we had a miscarriage because I thought that was what it was. But it was an abortion, and we were heartbroken and grateful all at once. It just took me over a year to realize it. https://t.co/x5XPu7pg2S

— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) September 16, 2022

I knew this would happen, and honestly I’ve already seen you do your worst so if this makes you feel better, great. It doesn’t make me feel worse though. pic.twitter.com/jCm8GH835V

— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) September 16, 2022

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.