". . . and having done all . . . stand firm." Eph. 6:13

Commentary

Chrissy Teigen: ‘I Told the World I had a Miscarriage,’ but ‘It was an Abortion’

October 2, 2022

Several weeks ago, Chrissy Teigen — model, television personality, and wife of singer John Legend — announced that what she had thought to be a miscarriage back in September of 2020 was actually an abortion.

In September 2020, Teigen had posted on her Instagram account that she and Legend had lost their child due to pregnancy complications. A month later, she posted a blog post detailing what had happened. According to Teigen herself, she was diagnosed with a partial placenta abruption, which is where “the placenta separates from the inner wall of the uterus before birth,” causing the child to be deprived of the oxygen and nutrients necessary to survive.

After several days of monitoring symptoms at home, it got worse and Teigen was admitted to the hospital where she received multiple blood transfusions in an attempt to save the baby. Tragically, nothing worked, and she was induced at 20 weeks to deliver her baby, Jack, who did not survive.

Now, two years later, Roe has been overturned and Teigen recently stated that she had a revelation that what she had viewed as a miscarriage in 2020 was in fact an abortion.

Almost exactly two years later, on September 15, 2022, Teigen gave a talk called “We Made That Choice” at social impact agency Propper Daley’s “A Day of Unreasonable Conversation” summit. This summit, where content creators and “changemakers” met to discuss “the most urgent issues of our time,” focused on topics such as “mental health, social and economic division, criminal justice, reproductive rights, climate change, and responsible tech.”

During her talk, Teigen brought up her miscarriage from 2020. “Two years ago, when I was pregnant with Jack … 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 then went on to say, “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.”

She went on to explain that her husband, John Legend, was actually the one who pointed this out to her in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. As she told attendees at the summit, she felt weird that she hadn’t previously thought about the loss of her child in 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.”

Despite the clear attempt that had been made in this situation to save the child’s life, the abortion industry and Planned Parenthood was quick to capitalize on Teigen’s statement, retweeting an article and stating, “Abortion saves lives. Sending [love] to you, @chrissyteigen. We are so grateful to you and everyone who bravely shares their story to remind us that abortion IS essential health care.”

Unfortunately, the term “abortion” has been highly politicized. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it ruled that there was not a constitutional right to abortion — meaning that women have no constitutional right to intentionally end their unborn child’s life. Though there are cases when a child must be prematurely delivered in order to save the mother’s life, these cases are not abortions even if they inadvertently result in the tragic death of the child.

According to Joy Stockbauer, a policy analyst for the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, “The abortion industry has been working to conflate lifesaving medical procedures with abortions in order to make abortion seem necessary. The tragic loss of a child that every effort was made to save is not the same thing as an abortion. An abortion directly and intentionally takes the life of an unborn child. In an abortion, no efforts are made to save the child’s life.”

In our post-Roe world, where the abortion industry is still reeling over the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June, the age-old adage could not be more true: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Nowadays, every medical nuance involved in prenatal care is reframed as an abortion (including miscarriages and treatment for ectopic pregnancies), with the end goal of convincing more and more of the American public that access to abortion is worthy of protection and expansion.

We must not let Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry succeed. As Stockbauer said, “While we cannot know with certainty what tragic circumstances ended the life of Chrissy Teigen’s child, her original words acknowledge what we know to be true: every baby’s life is a precious gift that changes the world, no matter how long or short it is.”

Claire Gatzke is the Manager of Annual Giving at Family Research Council.