“Two years ago, when I was pregnant with Jack, John and my third child, I had to make a lot of difficult and heartbreaking decisions,” the publication reported her saying at the summit. “It became very clear around halfway through that he would not survive, and that I wouldn’t either without any medical intervention.”
Following the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Teigen said she realized that what she had termed a miscarriage was actually an abortion.
“Let’s just call it what it was: It was an abortion,” she said. “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.”
“We were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed, despite bags and bags of blood transfusions. It was never enough,” she said in a statement shared on social media at the time.
Part of the debate surrounding abortion in some states has been whether it should be legal in cases where the mother’s life is at risk.
Teigen, according to THR, said it was during a discussion with her husband about abortion and the sympathy she felt for people who have to make an emotional decision to end a pregnancy that Legend helped her realize they were in fact those people.
“I fell silent, feeling weird that I hadn’t made sense of it that way,” she said. “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.”
“I told you all we had a miscarriage because I thought that was what it was,” she wrote. “But it was an abortion, and we were heartbroken and grateful all at once. It just took me over a year to realize it.”
CNN has reached out to a representative for Teigen for comment.
