Jenna Bush Hager has spoken candidly about her difficult experience with an ectopic pregnancy.
The TV host opened up about her ectopic pregnancy during a recent interview onToday with Amanda Bartolomeo, founder of the workout CorePlay, where they discussed health and wellness. During the conversation, she acknowledged how they discovered something that they had in common.
“When I first met Amanda, we started talking about finding your core, and what that means metaphorically for women and obviously, literally,” she said. “We both realised we both had had ectopic pregnancies.”
While a pregnancy usually begins with a fertilised egg attached to the uterus, this isn’t the case in an ectopic pregnancy, which is “when a fertilised egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus,” as noted by the Mayo Clinic. Although it can occur in other parts of the body, an ectopic pregnancy usually occurs in a fallopian tube. However, since this type of pregnancy can’t continue normally, “the fertilised egg can’t survive” and could cause “life-threatening bleeding,” if it isn’t treated.
Speaking with Bartolomeo, Hager recalled how her ectopic pregnancy happened before she welcomed her now nine-year-old daughter, Mila, whom she shares with husband Henry Hager. The pair also have a seven-year-old daughter, Poppy, and three-year-old son, Hall.
“I had one years ago, before I got pregnant with Mila,” she said. “I hadn’t really engaged my core because I’ve had six or seven stomach surgeries with C-sections, appendicitis, ectopic pregnancy.
“And so, I had sort of lost that part of me. But also as a woman, it was a really hard thing to go through.”
This isn’t the first time that the news reporter has been open about her ectopic pregnancy. During a conversation with Meredith Vieira on Today with Hoda & Jenna in 2019, Hager first revealed that she had the pregnancy in her fallopian tube.
After noting that she was “so excited” when she found that she was pregnant for the first time, she then recalled how her doctor couldn’t find the baby in her uterus.
“I got to the doctor’s office, and she was like, ‘Yeah, you’re pregnant…but we can’t find the baby,’” Hager explained. “And I had no idea what an ectopic pregnancy was. They look up, and the baby was in my fallopian tube.”
She continued: “My husband was out of town, my sister was in Africa. And so, I went into emergency and I had my fallopian tube removed, and I was alone.”
After Hager recalled that her husband met her at the hospital and took a cab home with her, she still acknowledged that experiencing an ectopic pregnancy was “very isolating”.
As noted by the Mayo Clinic, the way to “prevent life-threatening complications” of an ectopic pregnancy is to remove “the ectopic tissue”. Depending when the pregnancy is discovered, this removal could be done with medication, or through laparoscopic surgery or abdominal surgery.
