Jessa Duggar Seewald revealed that she had a miscarriage while pregnant with her fifth child.
In a Feb. 24 video posted to the “19 Kids and Counting” and “Counting On” star’s YouTube channel, Seewald took viewers inside her pregnancy journey with husband Ben Seewald and their children, Spurgeon, 7, Henry, 6, Ivy, 3, and Fern, 1.
She also had a miscarriage between the births of Ivy and Fern.
As Jessa Seewald explained in the video, toward the end of her first trimester in December 2022, she was feeling nausea, fatigue and food aversions, along with “the tiniest amount” of vaginal bleeding. A small amount of bleeding during pregnancy is often perfectly normal, but sometimes it can signal a miscarriage, according to the Mayo Clinic, which defines a miscarriage as a “spontaneous” loss before the 20th week of pregnancy.
She then had an ultrasound.
“As soon as she started taking a look at the baby, I could tell there was some concern in her voice,” she explained. “She said, ‘Well, the sac looks good; the baby does not.”
“At that moment, I was just in complete shock,” Seewald added. “I didn’t even have words. I just immediately started crying.”
“I feel like in some ways, missed miscarriages can be so much more jarring because you don’t have clear signs of something going wrong,” she said. “I had minimal spotting for like, 24 hours, and that was it.”
A “missed” miscarriage is one in which the fetus dies (or never formed) in utero, according to the Mayo Clinic, but the pregnancy is not expelled from the body.
Seewald continued, “I ended up having to go see my doctor because (of) my history of hemorrhaging and all of that, there was concern that if I tried to just take something or pass the baby at home that, that I might have trouble and have to be transported and all that. It just wasn’t something that seemed like a very good option. And so we decided to go to the hospital, get checked in there and go through the process of a D&C.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, dilation and curettage (D&C) is the process of removing uterine tissue to either diagnose or treat uterine conditions or after a miscarriage or abortion.
