13 Celebrities Who Opened Up About Having Miscarriages
Losing a baby through miscarriage is one of the most heartbreaking experiences that a parent will ever endure. Expectant couples may find it difficult to process the reeling emotions and grief after experiencing a miscarriage.
About 10 to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to the Mayo clinic. The number is higher, however, as many miscarriages occur early in a pregnancy when a woman doesn’t even know she is pregnant.
Though devastating to accept such a loss, it can be a comfort to hear stories of other people who have gone through the same experience. There are several celebrities who have shared their deeply personal stories about losing a baby to let you know you’re not alone.
Here are 13 celebrities who have spoken out about having miscarriages.
1. Meghan Markle
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Meghan Markle recently revealed she had a miscarriage in an open letter for the New York Times. She described how she came to realize that she lost her second baby with husband, Prince Harry.
The Duchess of Sussex was tending to her son, Archie, when she felt something wasn’t right. “After changing his diaper, I felt a sharp cramp,” she wrote. Shortly after, she realized she was experiencing a miscarriage. She wanted to share her experience to let others know they aren’t alone.
“Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few,” she said. “In the pain of our loss, my husband and I discovered that in a room of 100 women, 10 to 20 of them will have suffered from miscarriage. Yet despite the staggering commonality of this pain, the conversation remains taboo, riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning.”
2. Carrie Underwood
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Country singer Carrie Underwood revealed she had three miscarriages in two years.
In an emotional interview with CBS Sunday Morning in September 2018, Underwood shared that she and her husband Mike Fisher tried to have a second child but “it didn’t work out.”
“We got pregnant early 2017, and it didn’t work out,” she said. “In the beginning, it was like, God we know this just wasn’t your timing, and that is all right, we will bounce back and figure our way through it and got pregnant again in the spring, and it didn’t work out.”
Carrie said she got pregnant again in early 2018, but lost that pregnancy, too. “At that point, it was kind of like, ‘OK, what’s the deal? What is all of this?’” she said.
3. Chrissy Teigen
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On Sept. 30, 2020, Chrissy Teigen revealed in a candid Instagram post along with images that she and husband John Legend lost their baby.
“We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before,” she wrote in the caption. “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.”
While the couple didn’t name their first two children until after they were born, they had begun to call their third child Jack. “To our Jack — I’m so sorry that the first few moments of your life were met with so many complications, that we couldn’t give you the home you needed to survive. We will always love you.”
4. Michelle Obama
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Michelle Obama opened up about experiencing a miscarriage 20 years ago in her 2018 memoir, “Becoming.” The former first lady also underwent in vitro fertilization to conceive her two daughters, Sasha and Malia.
“I felt lost and alone, and I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were, because we don’t talk about them,” Obama told Good Morning America.
“We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken. That’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to talk to young mothers about the fact that miscarriages happen.”
5. Pink
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Last year, pop sensation Pink released her most vulnerable ballad entitled “Happy,” which shared her struggles with body image. Her lyrics revealed, “Since I was 17, I’ve always hated my body / and it feels like my body’s hated me.”
In an April 2019 interview, she said, “The reason I said (that it felt like my body hated me) is because I’ve always had this very tomboy, very strong gymnast body, but actually at 17 I had a miscarriage, and I was going to have that child,” she told USA Today in 2019. She added:
But when that happens to a woman or a young girl, you feel like your body hates you and like your body is broken, and it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. I’ve had several miscarriages since, so I think it’s important to talk about what you’re ashamed of, who you really are and the painful sh*t. I’ve always written that way.
6. Beyoncé
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Before becoming pregnant with her daughter Blue Ivy, Beyoncé experienced a miscarriage. She discussed the loss in her HBO documentary, “Life is But a Dream.” She turned her grief into a song, “Heartbeat.”
“I heard the heartbeat, which was the most beautiful music I ever heard in my life. … I picked out names. I envisioned what my child would look like … I was feeling very maternal.” But at the singer’s next checkup, there was no heartbeat.
“I went into the studio and wrote the saddest song I’ve ever written in my life … and it was the best form of therapy for me, because it was the saddest thing I’ve ever been through,” Beyoncé said.
7. Ali Wong
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Comedian Ali Wong took her experience of miscarrying twins and made it a part of her Netflix comedy special, “Baby Cobra.”
“It really helped me when I had a miscarriage to talk to other women and hear that they’d been through it, too,” she said in an interview with the Guardian in 2016. “It’s one thing to hear the statistics but it’s another to put faces to the numbers so you stop feeling like it’s your fault.”
“I think that’s one of the reasons women don’t tell people when they’ve had a miscarriage – they think it’s their fault. I remember I worried what my in-laws would think, she added. “I thought they’d think their son had married a terrible person. Also, because I made the mistake of telling people as soon as I got pregnant, I then had to tell them the bad news and then I felt like I was burdening them. So being able to joke about it was such a relief.”
8. Alanis Morissette
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Last year, singer Alanis Morissette shared she experienced multiple miscarriages in an interview with Self Magazine. “Between Ever and Onyx there were some false starts,” she said. “I always wanted to have three kids, and then I’ve had some challenges and some miscarriages so I just didn’t think it was possible.”
“I […] felt so much grief and fear. I chased and prayed for pregnancy and learned so much about my body and biochemistry and immunity and gynecology through the process. It was a torturous learning and loss-filled and persevering process,” she shared.
9. Gabrielle Union
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In her book “We’re Going to Need More Wine,” actress Gabrielle Union shared her struggles with infertility, failed IVF treatments and multiple miscarriages.
“I have had eight or nine miscarriages. For three years, my body has been a prisoner of trying to get pregnant — I’ve either been about to go into an IVF cycle, in the middle of an IVF cycle, or coming out of an IVF cycle.”
She also revealed to People magazine how she feels when asked by family and strangers when she’s having kids.
“For so many women, and not just women in the spotlight, people feel very entitled to know, ‘Do you want kids?’” she said. “A lot of people, especially people that have fertility issues, just say ‘no’ because that’s a lot easier than being honest about whatever is actually going on. People mean so well, but they have no idea the harm or frustration it can cause.”
10. Sharon Stone
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At the height of Sharon Stone’s career, she and then-husband Phil Bronstein tried to conceive, but all three of her pregnancies ended in miscarriages. The actress, who had a lupus-related rheumatoid factor that can cause problems in sustaining a pregnancy, had two miscarriages at five months.
“The last time I lost the baby, I went into 36 hours of labor,” she said. “While we were at the hospital, our adoption attorney called.” Though pregnant, she and Bronstein had also met with attorneys to start the adoption process. Stone became a mother when her adoptive son Roan was born on June 1, 2000.
11. Mariah Carey
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When Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon were expecting twins in 2010, they revealed on Access Hollywood that the singer’s first pregnancy had ended in miscarriage. The couple had been ready to tell their friends and family about the pregnancy when they discovered Carey had miscarried.
“It kind of shook us both and took us into a place that was really dark and difficult,” Carey shared. “When that happened … I wasn’t able to even talk to anybody about it. That was not easy.”
12. Lisa Ling
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Former “View” co-host Lisa Ling revealed she had a miscarriage during an episode of the talk show. She was seven weeks pregnant when she was told by doctors that her baby had no heartbeat.
“We actually [hadn’t] been trying that long,” she said. “I don’t know that I took it as seriously as I should have because it happened so fast. But then when I heard the doctor say there was no heartbeat it was like bam, like a knife through the heart.”
13. Wendy Williams
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Wendy Williams shared her experiences with miscarriage in a 2015 PBS special, “American Masters: The Women’s List.”
“I fought tooth and nail to be a mother,” the talk show host revealed. “I suffered several miscarriages including two at five months. That’s when you have the clothes already picked out, the nursery is already painted. They ask you do you want a funeral or do you want the cremation.”
“We went through that not once but twice, me and my husband. So our Kevin is a hard-won child. I would’ve loved to have had more children but I don’t want to test my blessing. Being a mother is for me. It’s not for everybody. It’s for me.”
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Maria Lianos-Carbone is the author of “Oh Baby! A Mom’s Self-Care Survival Guide for the First Year”, and publisher of amotherworld.com, a popular family lifestyle blog for women.
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