Mary Fitzgerald Bonnet announced her pregnancy on the high-end real estate reality show “Selling Sunset,” much to the excitement of her friends and fans. But a few short weeks later, she shared her tragic miscarriage – and its surrounding taboo – on the show as well.
After the joyful season premiere, Mary and husband Romain Bonnet were scheduled to get an ultrasound as part of routine prenatal care, and they had planned to show the ultrasound images off later that evening. That is, until they heard the devastating news that Mary had suffered a miscarriage and her baby had no heartbeat.
But being in the spotlight on a reality TV show meant the couple wasn’t allowed to grieve in peace, alone.
“Romain called them [the television crew] and said, ‘You are not coming. The scene is canceled, and we’re not doing this. We need time to process and grieve by ourselves,” Mary told Business Insider. “Of course, they still want to get the raw emotions and everything and tell the story. So, I did allow them the next morning. That can come off as production was not being sensitive, but they were actually very, very good and sensitive about everything.”
READ: Mom shares story of miscarriage at 9 weeks, and the response is overwhelming
Executive producer Sandee Manusakis urged her to push forward and show her grief on the show. “Something we said to her was, ‘It hurts now and it’s going to be something that’s going to be with you forever, but it’s something that you have this platform,'” he said. “So many women experience miscarriage. There’s all of these kind of stigmas surrounding it. So for her to be able to open up and share her story, it’s going to resonate with so many women that have also gone through the same thing.”
According to the National Library of Medicine, up to 1 in 4 women who know they’re pregnant will experience a miscarriage in their lives, sadly, quite a large number. However many women feel the stigma of grieving a miscarried baby. The pervasive media, Planned Parenthood, and activist narrative dehumanizes the preborn – calling them a “clump of cells” or products of conception – in order to make abortion palatable to the masses.
And as Live Action News has reported, this dehumanizing message gets absorbed by expectant mothers who are experiencing the grief of a miscarriage. The effect can be a worsening of the suffering of a mother who knows her preborn baby was real, but is bombarded with messages that preborn children “don’t exist,” and that there’s nothing to mourn but her own feelings of loss.
“I just feel numb right now,” said Mary in one scene informing her friend Amanza about the loss of her preborn baby. “I go from crying to just feeling numb. I don’t know what the normal time frame is to get over something like this and I just keep moving forward and trying to put a smile on my face and act like everything’s OK, but it doesn’t feel OK.”
