Why Hilaria Baldwin, Carrie Underwood and Other Stars Are Getting Real About Pregnancy Loss

Now a mom to daughter Jolie, 3, and son Jace, 10 months, the singer-actress revealed she debated sharing the story of her 2017 miscarriage “for the exact reason why it’s a silent struggle. I don’t want I’m sorry or sympathy. I just don’t want to feel alone.” More importantly, though, she didn’t want others to feel adrift: “For the women out there who have miscarried in the past and need support and a place to grieve their little one lost or to those in the thick of it like me who are currently grieving and in pain, let us all be there for each other.”

When she miscarried in early 2018, the actress found herself spending hours scouring the Internet looking for other women who understood her pain: “Someone to tell me that the depression and hopelessness were normal. That it wasn’t my fault. That I wasn’t broken forever,” she shared in an Instagram post. Finding a community of people who could tell her just that, inspired her to go public with her story. “It breaks my heart to think that losing a baby feels like something we have to keep to ourselves,” continued the star, now mom to 7-month old James. “Why is it any different than the death of a loved one? How is it any less meaningful? Here is what I have learned as I begin to crawl out of the dark hole: support is everything.”

Though the Scandal alum calls the loss of her first pregnancy “a very painful, triggering topic,” she notes, “like so many triggering and painful topics in motherhood, they really, really need to be talked about.” When she initially learned there was no heartbeat, her reaction, the mom to 2-year-old Albee recalled on her podcast, Katie’s Crib, “Was like, ‘Okay, let’s Olivia Pope the situation—let’s fix it. Let’s make the schedule. Let’s get to the hospital….When can I start trying again?'” But after her dilation and curettage procedure, she shared, “What happens is you have a major hormonal drop-off. And I think I was massively sad for about three months and I was only pregnant for three months.” 

“The loss of a miscarriage is not talked about enough,” Kidman offered as reason for opening up about both the miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy she endured during her nearly decade-long marriage to Tom Cruise. “That’s massive grief to certain women. There’s an enormous amount of pain and an enormous amount of joy on the other side of it.” 

Three miscarriages separated the arrivals of Underwood’s sons Isaiah, 4, and Jacob, 8 months. “In the beginning it was like, ‘Okay, God, we know this is, just wasn’t Your timing. And that is all right. We will bounce back and figure our way through it,” she shared in a revealing 2018 interview with CBS Sunday Morning, but she soon found herself struggling to cope as the losses continued. “I have this amazing life. Like, really, what can I complain about? I can’t,” she reasoned of her successful career and happy nine-year marriage to hockey player Mike Fisher. “Can I be mad? No. And I got mad.” 

When the former First Lady suffered a miscarriage before welcoming her first daughter Malia Obama in 1998, “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,” she shared in an ABC News interview last year. “We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken.” In an effort to do away with that misnomer, she wrote about her struggle and her experience using IVF to have Malia and 18-year-old Sasha Obama. “I think it’s the worst thing that we do to each other as women—not share the truth about our bodies and how they work and how they don’t work.”

“I talk about it often,” the actress wrote on Instagram of her experience miscarrying twins in 2018, “because I don’t want to hide the fact that it happened, I had a miscarriage. I am not looking for sympathy just the acknowledgment that it happened, because what hurts the most is the dismissal of it.” Mom to daughter Kenzie, 6, and son Hutton, 4, she is “incredibly grateful” for her family with husband Michael Cameron, she continued, but she’s learned to let herself grieve for what could have been: “In my heart I know we are not complete, I so strongly feel there is another little soul waiting to join our family.” 

No doubt the actress was thrilled when she learned once again she was carrying husband Jamie Bell‘s baby—a daughter they welcomed in May—but having miscarried once before, she found the experience nerve-wracking and bittersweet. “I was so excited,” she shared in June on Dr. Berlin’s Informed Pregnancy podcast, “but also sad that we weren’t as excited as we were the first time, because that was clear that it was a very different dynamic.”

Experiencing the loss of her second pregnancy when she was midway through, meant the reality star had to deliver the stillborn baby girl she and husband Austin Forsyth named Annabell Elise. “We only had her for 20 weeks, Life is fragile and precious,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “So thankful the Lord gave her to us for that short time! She will be in our hearts forever!”

The Pretty Little Liars alum used her 2018 loss as a teaching moment for her 26 million Instagram followers. After revealing in a New Year’s Day post that she had “lost the child of my hopes and dreams,” she called on others to show empathy. “In the spirt of the new year, I think that we need to remember that we are all on this journey together—in good times and in bad—and to remind ourselves that we seldom really know or understand the struggles and hardships that other people are going through. So, for 2019, let’s all try to be a little more compassionate, empathetic, patient and thoughtful with each other.” 

In the earliest stages of her grief, The View cohost blamed her 2019 miscarriage on herself. “Perhaps it was wrong of me to choose to be a professional woman, working in a high-pressure, high-visibility, high-stress field,” she wrote in a New York Times Magazine story. “I blamed my age, I blamed my personality, I blamed everything and anything a person could think of, and what followed was a deep opening of shame.” She realized eventually, however, there was nothing she could have done: “Life and death are beyond our power.” 

Having decided to ditch her birth control and see what happened earlier this year, The Hills: New Beginnings star was still nervous when she learned she was expecting again, having undergone a a tough first pregnancy and struggled through her first year as a mom to 2-year-old Sonny. That anxiety soon gave way to sadness when she learned there was no heartbeat. “The amount of various emotions I felt in the past couple weeks have been extreme,” she wrote on Instagram in July, “from shock to sadness to relief, which then led to guilt for feeing that relief.” Now, she continued, “I’m currently in the process of learning to accept that my feelings are valid no matter what they are.” 

As a gold medal-winning athlete, the gymnast was used to putting on a brave face, but she felt compelled to share the pain of her 2017 miscarriage, after hearing from others. “I would just sit in front of the computer for hours, reading comments and stories,” the Olympian, due to give birth this month, told E! News, “and piece by piece, I kind of built this community that helped me get back on my feet.” After witnessing her recovery, husband Andrew East agreed they should open up: “Since our community helped us so much, it’s like a way for us to help them.”

Sharing her April 2019 miscarriage as it happened wasn’t easy for the mom of four, but, as she explained on Today, “I wanted to come out and speak about it because it’s something that so many people deal with and, as women, we’re trained to deal with it silently.” That simply wasn’t an option for her, the yogi, now expecting a 2020 baby, noted in a Glamour essay, “Critics say something so personal should stay quiet. But I want woman to know if that’s not serving you, if that’s not the way that you’ll feel better, you don’t have to do that.”