Thank You, Chrissy Teigen
By: Jackie Gualtieri
Tags: Chrissy Teigen, Miscarriage, Feminism, Motherhood, Women

Thank You, Chrissy Teigen

She sacrificed her privacy for mothers everywhere.

Image by Chrissy Teigen on Instagram

We were warned that quarantine would bring about a generation of “quarantine babies.” Although we really ended up seeing higher divorce rates than higher baby rates, we would all be hard-pressed to go a day without hearing about a celebrity baby.

GiGi Hadid and Zayn Malik, Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry, Alec and Hilaria Baldwin, Ed Sheeran and Cherry Seaborn, Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger, Nikki Bella and Artem Chigvintsev (Brie Bella had a baby right around the same time!), Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake, and about 76 other couples all gave birth in 2020.

Chrissy Teigen and John Legend were expected to be on that list. Instead, she was admitted to the hospital due to complications which resulted in having to get blood transfusions to attempt to give her baby the fluids he needed. On Sept. 30, Chrissy shared a set of photos to Instagram and wrote:

“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. We never decide on our babies’ names until the last possible moment after they’re born, just before we leave the hospital. But we, for some reason, had started to call this little guy in my belly Jack. So he will always be Jack to us. Jack worked so hard to be a part of our little family, and he will be, forever.”

Chrissy shared a reality that my family knows too well.

As a teenager, I learned for the first time that I almost had another older sister. Before my big sister was born, my mom was pregnant with another child. My parents had a hard time conceiving. After a few years of trying, they had their first little miracle. And she was gone soon after.

I learned all this as a teenager because my cousin had just lost her first baby. She called my mom asking to talk, because she didn’t know who else to talk to who may understand the pain of losing a child before having a child. My mom never talked about it before. And she’s never talked about it since.

In 2020, my family lost their soon-to-be newest addition. In the face of a year of happy little babies on our Instagram feeds, we knew another little baby would not be in our future, not for some time. When my mom broke this news to me, one day before Chrissy shared her loss, she told me something about the pain that I never really thought of before. Miscarriages just happen and that’s a part of why they are so traumatic. If you have a miscarriage and ask a doctor what you could have done better, they’ll tell you that there’s nothing that could have been done. It makes trying again so terrifying, because trying again means setting yourself up for more heartbreak, knowing that there’s nothing you could be doing differently to prevent having the same fate.

If you’ve suffered a miscarriage, you’re feeling a pain many women know.

The reality is, most women share their babies on social media. They don’t share the babies who never came to be. That’s why you’ve been spending the last year learning about 82 new celebrity babies. And it’s why what Chrissy did was shocking — and important.

For women who know that they are pregnant, 10 to 15 percent end in miscarriage. But March of Dimes estimates that number could be as high as half of all pregnancies when you start factoring in people who did not know that they were pregnant.

Most people aren’t as open about these experiences because they are traumatic and they don’t want to relive them. But there’s another issue that factors into why miscarriages are kept a secret: shame. In 2015, a survey of 5,500 women revealed that 70 percent felt guilty and 79 percent felt that they were failures. The majority of women surveyed said that the shame was so prevalent, that they didn’t want to even talk to their own partners about it.

Though Chrissy is not the first celebrity to open up about her experience, she is one of the firsts to do it in real-time.

The secrecy of having a miscarriage has thankfully started to get a bit better in recent years. Former First Lady Michelle Obama shared her “lonely, painful, and demoralizing” experience in her memoir. Meghan McCain shared the blame she placed on herself following her miscarriage, writing:

“I blamed myself. Perhaps it was wrong of me to choose to be a professional woman, working in a high-pressure, high-visibility, high-stress field, still bearing the burden of the recent loss of my father and facing on top of that the arrows that come with public life. This is not a complaint. This is reality. I blamed my age, I blamed my personality. I blamed everything and anything a person could think of, and what followed was a deep opening of shame. This, I told myself, is the reason my body is a rock-strewn wasteland in which no child may live. This is my fault.”

Years after Blue Ivy was born, Beyonce shared that she had several miscarriages before giving birth to her daughter, how they showed her a need to find a deeper purpose in her life, how she needed to take care of herself in order to be in a place where she would be ready again for a child.

But these were lessons and reflections that came after. Chrissy is not sharing lessons and reflections. She’s sharing grief in real-time.

Even on the posts she’s shared on Instagram and Twitter, there are those who condemn her for sharing such a personal moment, that she’s looking for attention. And she is looking for attention. She’s looking for attention to be given to something that has been forced to stay in the dark, covered by shame, for decades upon decades. She’s shining a light on a reality that so many women have had to face alone.

Also on those posts are so many women who have commented to share that Chrissy is in good company. There are threads on her Twitter posts in which one woman shared that she had a similar experience, and many other women have commented back to say that they too shared that reality. In the span of just a few social media posts, Chrissy helped so many mothers to feel less alone, to bond over a sadness that they weren’t sure who understood.

Miscarriages not only happen, but they are common, more common than most women who experience them realize. They are real, and the grief that surrounds them is real. And they are not something to be shamed or silenced.