March 29, 2023
Our Life, Our Way: John Legend Defends Decision to Share Wife Chrissy Teigen’s Pregnancy Loss
John Legend and his wife, Chrissy Teigen, are one of the more transparent couples in Hollywood. Never afraid to share the highs and the lows that make them human, the pair has been met with praise and ridicule alike over the years.
This sentiment was never truer in 2020 than when the couple decided to share the loss of their third child, Jack, who died after complications with partial placental abruption led Chrissy to be induced at just 20 weeks.
“After a couple nights at the hospital, my doctor told me exactly what I knew was coming—it was time to say goodbye,” Chrissy wrote in a blog post published weeks after she shared the news. When the “All Of Me” singer and the Sports Illustrated supermodel first made the decision to publicly share their grief, the comments were flooded with women who had faced the same loss.
However, the trolls soon surfaced.
Some people criticized the peek into their private lives. Last year, Teigen admitted she underwent a medical abortion rather than a miscarriage or stillbirth. For context, these abortions use medication to induce labor and delivery in pregnancies with birth defects or complications and are mainly used after 16 weeks. Responses to her confession were laced in vitriol.
Legend fully supported his wife in a recent interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast.
“It’s hard because you feel—especially being the man in the relationship, not carrying the baby yourself—you feel this strong sense of grief but also this powerlessness, because you want to be there to protect, you want to be there to help, but you literally can’t do anything to really solve the core problem here,” he said. “So it was just heartbreaking. We felt powerless, and it was a deep, deep grief. Deep challenge, deep pain … We were able to get through it, but it was tough.”
About her decision to share Legend said, “She’d been sharing her journey through pregnancy…When it started getting complicated and she had to be in bed rest and we were trying to save the pregnancy, she was sharing all that. So it would have been weird to not share the outcome, ‘cause then it’s just like the baby just disappeared and there’s no explanation,” he said. “So it made sense to share it, but it was still hard.”
The couple has since welcomed daughter, Esti, into their family, which includes daughter Luna, 6 and son Miles, 4.