“I don’t want women to go through it alone.”
“You’re a sick individual,” one woman commented on an Instagram post by Chrissy Teigen, in September 2020. In the series of images, Teigen is sobbing on a hospital bed—she had just shared her traumatic pregnancy loss and the death of her infant son, Jack.
The commenter’s profile picture showed her kissing a fat, beautiful baby on the cheek.
“Aaaaaaahahahahahaha,” added another woman, whose bio identified her as “proudly” a mother. “Seems like she got over this real fast,” wrote another woman, whose own account shows her glowing and happy in a professional maternity shoot, followed by pictures of her newborn.
The death of a child is, perhaps, the most intimate loss. As a celebrity, Teigen is afforded an outpouring of love and a degree of privilege most people can’t imagine. But in using her public platform to share honestly from her grief, she was also bombarded with unrelenting cruelty. Not long after Jack’s death, Teigen learned that she wouldn’t be able to get pregnant again. She (temporarily) shut down her Twitter account shortly after, citing constant abuse.
This month Teigen is unveiling a new project—a fertility campaign. She’s partnering with the national infertility association Resolve to create an online platform, Fertility Out Loud, a “one-stop shop” of resources for people dealing with fertility issues, with the hope of educating people and reducing the stigma surrounding infertility. “We really wanted to create a community of people who are going through the same struggles,” she tells Glamour. “To go on this fertility journey together because it is such a journey.”
It’s deeply arresting that Chrissy Teigen would choose to be the face of a major fertility education campaign shortly after losing a child and learning that she can no longer conceive. To do so after facing ridicule for that loss just feels unfathomable. What moved her to offer expertise to the public, when—
“—when you feel like they don’t deserve any more information from you ever again?” she finishes the question, laughing darkly. “I had been on the internet long enough to know that was going to happen,” she says, citing comments that accused her of begging for attention. “I just knew sharing would impact a lot more people positively than it would negatively.”
And it did. The vast, vast majority of comments on Teigen’s posts about her son’s death were not cruel but compassionate. The thread under her Instagram post looks like a message board for bereaved parents. “I know the heartache—I lost four babies,” wrote one woman. “My wife and I recently lost a son,” a man chimed in. “I lost five in my mid-30s,” one woman wrote. And another added: “We experienced the loss of our twins at 16 weeks 5 days last night. Sitting here with them now in the hospital, it made me feel a little a less alone having seen your experience as well.”
“I believe holding in anything where you’re feeling any kind of hurt or guilt or pain or shame is a terrible thing for your body,” Teigen says. Struggling with fertility “can be emotionally terrible, honestly.” And so even though she’s no longer trying to conceive, she’s not going to stop talking about it until it’s destigmatized.
The National Women’s Health Resource Center reports that a couple between the ages of 29 and 33 with a normal, functioning reproductive system has only a 20% to 25% chance of conceiving in any given month. And men are just as likely to be the cause of fertility struggles as women, though you wouldn’t know that from the almost total absence of male infertility narratives in the mainstream.
For women especially, Teigen says, the silence around fertility issues makes a painful experience into a torturous one. “Women are just too damn tough on ourselves,” she says. “We want to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect girlfriend, the perfect employee, the perfect boss.” Because of social media’s pervasive baby bumps and pastel photo shoots, she says, it’s easy to feel as though everyone else is getting pregnant, as though no one is struggling. “You think, Oh, my God, something’s wrong with me,” she says. “This spiral of shame is so toxic and so bad for us.” So many brave women have spoken about this in the past few years—a feeling of brokenness, of failure, while trying to become a mother. “To be alone and isolated in that feeling is the worst,” Teigen says. “And I don’t want any woman to have to go through that feeling alone, ever.”
When Teigen and her husband, John Legend, first started trying to have a baby, not getting pregnant felt crazy-making. “We were young and we had been trying for a while, and it just wasn’t happening for us,” she says. “I just wish there had been a place for us to be able to go.” She’s hopeful that this campaign will provide this place—a place where women and couples can learn that fertility treatments aren’t all scary needles and incomprehensible treatment methods. When she first started looking for answers about pregnancy, Teigen confesses that she searched Reddit threads, places “where you can ask your questions and be vulnerable anonymously.” She wants Fertility Out Loud to be all that and more—a community of people supporting each other, strangers cheering each other on and getting educated without the casual cruelty of her Instagram comment section.
But that photo, and that reveal, the mammoth loss she shared with a billion strangers? “I would do it all over again in a second,” she says. “For the sheer amount of people that it helped, I don’t care.”
Original article appeared on GLAMOUR US | Author Jenny Singer
