Hilaria Baldwin is looking back on a particularly painful time while growing her family.
On an episode of her iHeartRadio podcast Witches Anonymous, the 38-year-old mom of seven and co-host Michelle Campbell Mason discussed their fertility journeys with Young and the Restless actress Michelle Stafford.
During the conversation, Baldwin shared her experience of having had two miscarriages back-to-back in 2019 and explained why she discussed them openly at the time, despite people being critical of her growing family.
"I had had some chemical pregnancies scattered until baby number four. And then I got pregnant naturally in the spring of 2019, so before my fourth kid was one because I had them all back-to-back," she explained, noting the "heartbeat wasn't good" from the beginning of the pregnancy.
Baldwin was told the outlook wasn't promising, which she reasoned with herself about. She explained, "I'm pretty stoic in some ways. I'm like, 'Okay, I haven't had a miscarriage after heartbeat, I've had four kids. They say one in five children miscarriage, so this is it.'"
That pregnancy continued until around nine weeks when there was no longer a heartbeat. "So I went from week six to week nine going every few days and watching the heartbeat get slower and slower and slower," she shared, recalling going public with the intimate information and discussing it on Today at the time.
It was after that miscarriage that the couple tried in-vitro fertilization for the first time, and had success early on. "I went that entire summer of 2019 taking hormones and doing the whole preparation to transfer the embryo. In the late summer, I transferred the embryo and I was doing my own shots."
"Right before the heartbeat, I started having this crazy, crazy cramping and a lot of bleeding. We were sure that I was miscarrying and I was thinking, 'I've come so far.'"
She then went to the doctor to discover there was a heartbeat and was "so excited." It was during that time she decided to go public with the pregnancy to share her experience, though it was early on.
"I told my daughter, Carmen. It was a girl, so I said to my daughter, 'we're going to get your sister.' We have all our boys, we love our boys and I'm a boy mom, but she wanted another sister. She has an older sister," she explained.
When it came to discussing her 16-week appointment, Baldwin began to cry, recalling she had "this weird feeling because I couldn't feel the baby and I can usually feel the baby really early on."
"She puts the wand on my belly, and the baby's not moving," she remembered. "She was dead."
In that moment, Baldwin recalled screaming. "I called Alec. He was on a bus, he was on a public bus at the time. I just didn't know what to do."
She got dressed and talked to the doctor, who reminded her about her age, saying, "but know you didn't do anything wrong, but you are old. And wow, what bad luck, you had two miscarriages in a row."
After walking around crying and eventually getting home, Baldwin said she "needed to tell people right away."
"I couldn't handle people congratulating me and people write me all the time congratulating me. I told Carmen, I told my daughter. I hope it wasn't throwing too much on her plate, but she had to know the truth."
That was when she filmed the emotional video she shared on her social media that day, where she shared tears about the loss with Carmen.
"I couldn't believe how many tears could come out of you. And then you fall asleep and you wake up and remember that it's true," she said. "And I had a belly."
Explaining she had a dilation and evacuation (D&E), she was surprised to learn she got pregnant naturally just six weeks later, and the couple still had an embryo leftover. She didn't have faith that the pregnancy would progress and worried that her carrying the embryo would result in "failure."
"If I put her inside of me, it's going to be a death sentence. I was going to try to house her, just like I tried to house the babies I conceived naturally, and I was going to kill her," she recalled thinking.
It was during this time Baldwin talked to a friend who introduced her to surrogacy and while she was "very not sure" at first, it allowed her to later welcome daughter Marílú.
"Had the people who judged me so much, if they knew all the reasons why — they shouldn't have to. Don't judge about things you don't know about," Baldwin continued. "And my Marílú, who was the one born via surrogacy, her story starts with the loss that I had. Her coming here, there's a connection between those two souls."
