About one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, and yet the experience remains shrouded in stigma, silence, and, sometimes, criminal suspicion. But in a new episode of She MD, Whitney Port opened up about her personal experiences with miscarriage and a near-decade-long struggle to conceive a second child, in heart-rending detail, for the first time.
After having her son at 32, the now 40-year-old suffered a string of miscarriages. “About a year after I had Sonny, I got pregnant again and then miscarried at around eight weeks, and I had another miscarriage after that,” she recounted, explaining, “I’ve had a total of five miscarriages. One at eight weeks, a few at nine weeks, and one ended up at 11 weeks. All with heartbeats.”
Miscarriage can be a grueling and even life-threatening experience, and it’s not at all uncommon for someone to miscarry an embryo that has a heartbeat. But amid the ongoing reproductive health crisis in the U.S., it’s worth highlighting that, in abortion-banned states, doctors can face prison and/or fines if they perform an abortion procedure to safely end a miscarriage while the embryo has a heartbeat. In the first trimester, this often involves dilation and curettage (D&C), but more and more women have reported being denied this routine and life-saving procedure because hospitals are concerned about their state’s vague and confusing abortion bans.
Eventually, a fertility specialist recommended that Port try IVF and she produced four embryos: two male and two female. “The week before I did a transfer, I got extremely sick, throwing up so much that I ended up having to have an endoscopy, and it was just a whole situation,” she said. “I ended up not being able to do the transfer and basically had, like a mental breakdown.”
She soon pivoted to surrogacy, which also proved to be a challenge. “She went on bedrest, but then she miscarried, and the doctor recommended that we try again with her,” Port said of her surrogate, who suffered a subchorionic hemorrhage. “He thought that it was just something random.” When they tried again with the same surrogate, “the same thing happened, and heartbeat and everything, and then she miscarried.” At that point, Port and her partner paused their efforts: “We obviously decided… we needed to take a little bit of a breather from everything.”
In August, Port revealed that she’d soon retrieve more eggs for her surrogacy journey. “I’m feeling awful,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “It’s not the physical discomfort (which totally sucks- bloating, bruising, swelling, heaviness) but the emotional discomfort.” On the She MD podcast, Port said she and her partner still have two embryos from the previous round of egg retrieval and that they’re currently “on the search for a new surrogate.”
While, at least publicly, Port hasn’t drawn connections between her harrowing personal experiences and the right’s continued attacks on reproductive rights, her candor is refreshing and rare. The more mysterious that common experiences like miscarriage are, the more misinformation spreads.
Port also shared her story at a time when IVF itself has come under increasing threat, in the wake of a court ruling in Alabama that determined frozen embryos are “extrauterine children” whose destruction warrants wrongful death lawsuits. Other states like Florida have since introduced bills that would similarly qualify the destruction of embryos for wrongful death suits, while, on the federal level, Republicans in Congress have continuously blocked legislation to codify a federal right to IVF and other fertility treatments since 2022. Earlier this month, President Trump’s Health and Human Services Department gutted an agency dedicated to researching infertility treatment.
On Monday night, Port previewed her episode on She MD on her Instagram story, and also told her followers she’ll soon be recording a podcast episode with her fertility doctor, Catha Fischer, soliciting questions from her followers.
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