Chrissy Tiegen revealed her 2020 miscarriage was actually an abortion while speaking at a summit held by social impact agency Propper Daley on Thursday.
The Model revealed her miscarriage was in fact an abortion during Propper Daley's "A Day of Unreasonable Conversation" summit hosted by the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
"Let’s just call it what it was: It was an abortion," said Tiegen during the summit's “We Made That Choice" program.
"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 revealed that she and husband singer/songwriter John Legend had lost their son named Jack in an October 2020 Instagram post that featured several black and white images of the couple in a hospital setting. In several photos, Legend appeared to be comforting a distraught Teigen including an image of the couple holding what appeared to be a baby wrapped in a swaddle.
The baby's death appeared to be caused by childbirth complications according to the post's caption.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. 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. Thank you to everyone who has been sending us positive energy, thoughts and prayers. We feel all of your love and truly appreciate you. We are so grateful for the life we have, for our wonderful babies Luna and Miles, for all the amazing things we’ve been able to experience. But everyday can’t be full of sunshine. On this darkest of days, we will grieve, we will cry our eyes out. But we will hug and love each other harder and get through it.
A month after the couple revealed they had lost their child, Teigen made another Instagram post featuring several pages of text describing the hospital visit. Teigen said she received an epidural to "[deliver the 20 week old] that would have never survived in [her] belly." Doctors had diagnosed her pregnancy as a partial placenta abruption and informed Teigen she may not survive if the pregnancy continued, according to the post.
"I had asked my mom and John to take pictures, no matter how uncomfortable it was," she wrote, saying she needed the photos to remember the experience. "My mom, John and I each held [baby Jack] and said our own private goodbyes." Teigen further detailed the aftermath in her post.
After the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June, Teigen claimed she came to the realization that baby Jack's miscarriage was in fact an abortion.
“I told the world we had a miscarriage, the world agreed we had a miscarriage, all the headlines said it was a miscarriage," Teigen said. "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.”
