Hilaria Baldwin.Photo: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic
Hilaria Baldwinis looking back on a particularly painful time while growing her family.
On an episode of her iHeartRadio podcastWitches Anonymous, the 38-year-old mom of seven and co-host Michelle Campbell Mason discussed their fertility journeys withYoung and the Restlessactress Michelle Stafford.
During the conversation, Baldwin shared her experience of having had two miscarriages back-to-back in 2019 and explained why she discussed them openly at the time, despite people being critical of her growing family.
Baldwin was told the outlook wasn’t promising, which she reasoned with herself about. She explained, “I’m pretty stoic in some ways. I’m like, ‘Okay, I haven’t had a miscarriage after heartbeat, I’ve had four kids. They say one in five children miscarriage, so this is it.'”
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Hilaria and Alec Baldwin in 2021.Jamie McCarthy/Getty
That pregnancy continued until around nine weeks when there was no longer a heartbeat. “So I went from week six to week nine going every few days and watching the heartbeat get slower and slower and slower,” she shared, recalling going public with the intimate information and discussing it onTodayat the time.
It was after that miscarriage that the couple tried in-vitro fertilization for the first time, and had success early on. “I went that entire summer of 2019 taking hormones and doing the whole preparation to transfer the embryo. In the late summer, I transferred the embryo and I was doing my own shots.”
“Right before the heartbeat, I started having this crazy, crazy cramping and a lot of bleeding. We were sure that I was miscarrying and I was thinking, ‘I’ve come so far.'”
She then went to the doctor to discover there was a heartbeat and was “so excited.” It was during that time she decided to go public with the pregnancy to share her experience, though it was early on.
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“I told my daughter, Carmen. It was a girl, so I said to my daughter, ‘we’re going to get your sister.’ We have all our boys, we love our boys and I’m a boy mom, but she wanted another sister. She has an older sister,” she explained.
In that moment, Baldwin recalled screaming. “I called Alec. He was on a bus, he was on a public bus at the time. I just didn’t know what to do.”
She got dressed and talked to the doctor, whoreminded her about her age, saying, “but know you didn’t do anything wrong, but you are old. And wow, what bad luck, you had two miscarriages in a row.”
After walking around crying and eventually getting home, Baldwin said she “needed to tell peopleright away.”
“Icouldn’t handle people congratulating meand people write me all the time congratulating me. I told Carmen, I told my daughter. I hope it wasn’t throwing too much on her plate, but she had to know the truth.”
That was when she filmed theemotional video she shared on her social media that day, where she shared tears about the loss with Carmen.
“I couldn’t believe how many tears could come out of you. And then you fall asleep and you wake up and remember that it’s true,” she said. “And I had a belly.”
Explaining she had a dilation and evacuation (D&E), she was surprised to learn she got pregnant naturally just six weeks later, and the couple still had an embryo leftover. She didn’t have faith that the pregnancy would progress and worried that her carrying the embryo would result in “failure.”
“If I put her inside of me, it’s going to be a death sentence. I was going to try to house her, just like I tried to house the babies I conceived naturally, and I was going to kill her,” she recalled thinking.
It was during this time Baldwin talked to a friend who introduced her to surrogacy and while she was “very not sure” at first, it allowed her to laterwelcome daughter Marílú.
“Had the people who judged me so much, if they knew all the reasons why — they shouldn’t have to. Don’t judge about things you don’t know about,” Baldwin continued. “And my Marílú, who was the one born via surrogacy,her story starts with the loss that I had. Her coming here, there’s a connection between those two souls.”
source: people.com
