Television personality and model Chrissy Teigen on Thursday told the story of how she came to realize she actually had an abortion, not a miscarriage, at a White House event that marked two years since the U.,S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
“I ended up having a placental abruption and was bleeding out essentially, but felt no pain. It was very — it was an odd, unique experience because I always imagined if you were losing a baby, you would feel some sort of cramping or pain. And I just remember going to the hospital and really feeling like things were gonna be okay,” Teigen said in a sitdown discussion with Vice President Kamala Harris about reproductive rights and the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned Roe. “But things turned bad very quickly. I needed blood transfusion after blood transfusion.”
“I remember feeling so lucky that I had the care that I had and the ability to make decisions with my doctor. We ended up having an abortion. And it’s so weird to say, because I didn’t realize that. I didn’t realize that until the Dobbs decision, when John and I were talking about it in bed one day,” she continued, recounting a conversation she had with her husband, singer John Legend. “And I was talking about it from a place of, I feel so bad for people, for other people, for them, that anyone’s ever had to go through that, and they’re not able to make a choice about their own body. And he was like, well, you had an abortion. I was like, what?! I had no idea.”
“That language wasn’t used in the room that I was in. It was never said by my doctor. It was never said by anyone around me. So, I just assumed that I had miscarried,” Teigen said. “I honestly felt so ignorant for not having known that for so many years, that I didn’t know it was happening to my own body. But I think that word is so scary to people. It’s so taboo to talk about.”
Teigen remarked that events such as this and people speaking out about their experiences would help the topic of abortion become less taboo — and pointed to an experience she had when she visited the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta.
“Hearing stories from your clinic, hearing that so many women come in there — and it’s not a place of sadness all the time. It’s not a place where people are feeling at their darkest points or anything. Like the world wants you to think. Some people go in there with so much hope and so much, sorry —” Teigen said as she started getting emotional. “And so much excitement because they know that they have a future.”
