Jennie Garth and her husband Dave Abrams are opening up about a difficult moment in their lives.
On an episode of her iHeartPodcast, I Choose Me with Jennie Garth, the couple shares that they went through two consecutive miscarriages right after they got married in 2015. Garth, 52, who is already mom to daughters Luca, 27, Lola, 21, and Fiona, 18, whom she shares with ex Peter Facinelli, admits that she doesn’t remember a lot from the time since she has blocked it out.
“This is a pretty vulnerable topic, and I really appreciate you being open to talking about it because I think it could help some people,” Garth begins. “What point in our relationship did we start talking about maybe wanting to have kids together?”
“Well, if you remember, we got married on July 11,” Abrams, 43, shares. “And then we got pregnant that same month.”
“We got pregnant naturally,” Garth adds.
“Yeah. We got back from Carmel. We went to a little mini honeymoon to Carmel up in Monterey. And like two weeks later, you were pregnant,” Abrams remembers.
Abrams says that he was excited to learn that the two were expecting, adding that he was a little bit in shock. “Well, we went to Nancy, your doctor, the gynecologist, and yeah, we were good to go,” Abrams remembers. “And then that lasted almost four months. And then, you know, we found out.”
“What do you mean?” Garth asks.
“Well, I don’t want to get emotional in the first 15 minutes of a podcast,” Abrams says. “Yeah, we found out that there was no heartbeat.”
Abrams shares that although he was upset, he wasn’t resentful towards his wife — more so, he was just disappointed and sad at the situation. The two were then told they could proceed with a dilation and curettage procedure (DNC).
According to the Mayo Clinic, a dilation and curettage procedure is a “procedure to remove tissue from inside your uterus. Health care professionals perform dilation and curettage to diagnose and treat certain uterine conditions — such as heavy bleeding — or to clear the uterine lining after a miscarriage or abortion.”
“I think I remember them saying we could just wait and let it work its way,” Garth says. “Let nature take its course or we could do the procedure. And we opted to do the procedure because it was just too much for me to carry a baby that had been terminated.”
“Yeah, it was totally heavy,” Abrams responds.
Garth had the procedure the same day she was told her baby didn’t have a heartbeat, and the two said they then told themselves that perhaps it wasn’t in the cards to have a baby together.
“But then it happened again,” Abrams remembers. “Naturally,” Garth adds, asking why she can’t remember this one either.
“So that one was shorter. I remember we had to switch doctors. And this one was only, you know, you found out you got pregnant. And then this was only like a month and a half,” Abrams says. “I think the doctor at the time was like, ‘Well, it’s not going to be healthy anyway.’ So then we did the DNC again.”
“And then by that time, I think it had definitely taken an emotional toll which we didn’t know how to communicate at the time. So we kind of just wrapped it up and then other things kind of came in the fold,” he continues.
A little later in the conversation, Garth admits she was disappointed in herself because she wanted to give her husband a baby.
“I think at that time, I was feeling really down on myself, really ashamed, feeling like I was disappointing you, like I wasn’t able to carry a pregnancy with you, who I loved,” she remembers. “And I had had these three beautiful daughters with Peter, and you had stepped in and become such a wonderful stepdad to them.”
“And so I remember I so, so, so wanted to give you a baby boy,” Garth says.
