Whitney Port Shares Her Harrowing Experience With Multiple Miscarriages for the 1st Time
While, at least publicly, Port didn’t draw a connection between her personal infertility experience and the reproductive rights crisis in the U.S., her candor is refreshing and rare.
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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.