Chrissy Teigen is currently expecting what would have been her fourth child with husband John Legend. The couple already shared a daughter Luna, 6, son Miles, 4, as well as a son named Jack who died in stillbirth in September 2020.
At the time, Teigen told fans that she had suffered a miscarriage. But with reproductive rights being stripped from women across the country, the former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model has now come forward to clarify what had actually occurred was a life-saving abortion.
The Cravings author addressed her abortion on Thursday while giving a talk on the “We Made That Choice” panel at the A Day of Unreasonable Conversation summit, hosted by the social impact agency Propper Daley. But because until recently, medically-necessary abortions have been so ingrained in fundamental reproductive healthcare, Teigen says that even she didn’t come to terms with the fact that she had an abortion until recently.
In fact, it was only after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer when Teigen said she had expressed sympathy for all the women being forced to endure such an emotional decision, that her husband had pointed out that she was also among their ranks — according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“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.
Let’s just call it what it was: It was an abortion. 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.
I fell silent, feeling weird that I hadn’t made sense of it that way. 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.”
Good on Teigen for speaking out. Because while she was fortunate enough to receive the medical care that saved her life, thousands of women won’t be so lucky — particularly in the growing number of red states which have become ham-fisted about cutting off access to basic reproductive healthcare. And unfortunately, many of their stories won’t have the same outcome.
