Pop star John Legend was recently interviewed by Shannon Sharpe on on Club Shay Shay, where they discussed a number of issues… including the supposed “abortion” his wife Chrissy Teigen had. But as Live Action News has addressed before, striving to save life and being unable to do so does not require intentionally killing another human being by induced abortion.
In 2020, Legend and Teigen lost their son, Jack, in a heartbreaking experience that they shared with the world. In black-and-white-photos, Teigen was seen crying in her hospital bed, receiving what appeared to be an epidural, and holding baby Jack as she cried. According to Teigen, she was having complications due to problems with her placenta before Jack died, and that, despite the best efforts of doctors to save Jack’s life, they were unable to.
“We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before,” she wrote at the time. “We were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed, despite bags and bags of blood transfusions. It just wasn’t enough.”
It wasn’t until two years later, after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, that Teigen suddenly began to claim that she had an abortion… and said it was her husband who made her realize she had a supposed abortion, as opposed to a natural death which doctors sought to prevent.
“I was talking about it from a place of, ‘I feel so bad for … anyone who’s ever had to go through that, and they’re not able to make a choice of their own body,’ and he was like, ‘Well, you had an abortion,’” she said. “I was like, what? I had no idea … I just assumed that I had miscarried.”
Why would anyone want people to think they’d had an abortion when they actually had not? One reason could be ignorance of what an induced abortion actually is, opposed to an early delivery to save a mother’s life. Another reason could simply be the desire to jump aboard the “I had a necessary/empowering abortion” train that has become popular with Hollywood celebrities.
In the interview with Sharpe, Legend repeated the claim that his wife had aborted their child, claiming “she had a lifesaving abortion.”
Did Teigen have an abortion?
Legend claimed (emphasis added):
So my wife, she was well past 15 weeks when she had to have an abortion. She was miscarrying, and bleeding out, and all these things were happening. Her life was in danger. And for the government to say, oh, we need to evaluate this to make sure you’re sufficiently dying before you can have an abortion. That’s what they’re saying in Texas and in Georgia and in all these states where they have Trump abortion bans. They’re saying we need to, the government needs to evaluate whether you are sufficiently dying before you can have an abortion.
Not your doctor, not you and your family, the government. No, stay out of it. Let these women, let them and their families and their doctors make these decisions. We don’t need the government to be involved in it. And if the government’s involved, that means the police and the district attorney are involved in medical decisions.
Teigen and Legend both have retroactively begun claiming she had an abortion, as opposed to a miscarriage or preterm delivery. The reality is simple: Teigen did not have an abortion. An induced abortion is committed with the specific goal of causing the death of a preborn child. As Teigen pointed out herself, doctors did everything they could to save Jack’s life. Neither Teigen, Legend, nor their doctors did anything to intentionally cause Jack to die.
The goal was to save Teigen’s life, and to try to save Jack’s life as well. In her original recounting, doctors tried giving her blood transfusions and fluids, specifically in an effort to save Jack. The goal was never to kill him.
It’s not clear what procedure Teigen underwent, but despite Legend’s claims that the government would have needed to grant approval before a doctor intervened, with Teigen’s life in danger, it would have been legal in every single state.
What’s in the womb?
He added that he wasn’t always pro-choice because he “grew up in the church,” apparently where he was “taught that we were supposed to be pro-life… But as soon as I became an adult, I just realized that we need that choice.” It appears Legend may be implying that the church’s beliefs about the sanctity of human life — including human life in the womb — are beliefs for children, not grown adults. But the biological facts about human life in the womb aren’t fairy tales or children’s stories.
He then said:
But then when we went through all these fertility struggles and then had a miscarriage, it made it even more clear to me how personal everything that happens in that room with your OB/GYN, everything that happens in that room is private. And it’s so intensely personal and intensely physical. A woman feels every aspect of this thing.
He then referred to the child in the womb as essentially a non-human (emphasis added): “Forcing them to carry something for nine months that they don’t want. A government doing that? That’s crazy to me.”
That “something” is a human being in existence through no fault of his or her own, who has an inherent right to not be unjustly killed.
Why do women have late-term abortions?
“And then what people don’t realize is when you say, oh, I’m fine with it as long as it’s up to 15 weeks. People that have an abortion after 15 weeks, almost always they wanted to keep the baby. But there’s some kind of complication that came up that they have to have an abortion,” Legend claimed.
This is a common pro-abortion myth: that most late-term abortions are committed out of necessity, due to medical complications. But this is false. The reality is, late-term abortions are rarely committed because of medical emergencies with either the mother or the baby.
A 1988 Guttmacher study found that just two percent (2%) of women who had abortions late in pregnancy did so because of a health problem with the baby. More than 20 years later, a 2013 study also published by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute said, “[D]ata suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.”
Another study from the pro-abortion ANSIRH stated, “The reasons people need third-trimester abortions are not so different from why people need abortions before the third trimester… [T]he circumstances that lead to someone needing a third-trimester abortion have overlaps with the pathways to abortion at other gestations.”
That research also revealed, “There are thus many reasons—financial, logistical, and social—why third-trimester abortion care is exceptional compared to first-trimester abortion care. However, there is reason to believe that the circumstances that lead to someone needing a third-trimester abortion are not exceptional. Several studies have highlighted the importance of the timing of pregnancy discovery, with later discovery associated with later presentation to abortion care. Other research has identified how laws that complicate people’s ability to access abortion, including parental involvement laws and laws that contribute to the reduction of abortion clinics, are associated with later presentation to abortion care for patients.” Some women in the study reported that they didn’t know they were pregnant until later in pregnancy, and therefore, their abortions took place late in pregnancy.
Pro-abortion researcher Diana Greene Foster stated, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service, that abortions for fetal abnormalities “make up a small minority of later abortion.” In addition, a 2010 paper from Julia Steinberg of the pro-abortion Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health said, “Research suggests that the overwhelming majority of women having later abortions do so for reasons other than fetal anomaly (Drey et al., 2006; Finer et al., 2005, 2006; Foster et al., 2008).”
Stories like Legend’s and Teigen’s being used to argue in favor of abortion are designed to tug on Americans’ heartstrings. Yet while the loss of their child was undeniably tragic and heartbreaking, that does not make what happened an abortion, and it is not an argument in favor of abortion, either.
Women deserve to know the truth about abortion, and that includes the peace of knowing that interventions in miscarriage or stillbirth are not the same things as intentionally taking their child’s lives.
