The model and advocate details her health scare after the birth of her twin sons.
Ashley Graham is speaking out about miscarriage, pregnancy and relearning how to love her body after giving birth. In an essay for Glamour, the model and advocate shares, for the first time, what happened in the early morning of her labor with her twin sons, Malachi and Roman.
"The night I gave birth to the twins, I hemorrhaged," Graham wrote. "It was 2 a.m. when my contractions started. At 3:45 a.m. I went to the toilet thinking I needed the bathroom, and Malachi came out just as my doula was arriving, in time to bring him into the world." She continues, "Two hours and seven minutes later, I had Roman in my apartment bathtub—we didn’t even have enough time to blow up the home birthing tub because everything happened so fast."
Graham says while at first, she was happy that her twins came into the world in incredibly fast fashion -- a total of three and a half hours in labor -- the next morning she blacked out from pain and was given emergency treatment to try to stop excessive bleeding.
"I remember seeing darkness and what seemed like stars," Graham wrote of briefly losing consciousness. "They didn’t want to tell me, right then, that I’d lost liters of blood. They didn’t want to tell me that one of the midwives had to flip me over, press her finger down right above my vagina bone to try and stop the bleeding. And they didn’t want to tell me that the vein in my arm kept collapsing and they couldn’t get the needle in for the Pitocin, so they’d had to put it in my hand."
The motivation behind Graham's transparency is to help other women who have gone through similar, traumatic experiences during childbirth.
"I tell you all of this—in pretty unflinching detail—because I believe in the importance of honesty; in revealing things about myself that I hope will help others talk about what they too have been through," Graham wrote.
Graham then goes on to reveal that she experienced a miscarriage in between her first son, Isaac, and the birth of her twins. "I’ve not shared this until now, but I fell pregnant in January of 2021, on my husband’s birthday. Because it was my second pregnancy, I started to show early, and we were so excited. But at the end of February, I had a miscarriage," she wrote.
While the model quickly rose to fame for her candid, honest nature and body-positive advocacy, this is a whole new level of vulnerability and openness. Graham explains that while her roller coaster of childbirth and motherhood has been incredibly trying, it also has connected her to her own body like never before.
"I tell myself that I am a warrior for carrying and birthing my babies, for surviving the hemorrhage, for being a mother to my three boys, and yet also still struggling with the transformation of my body," she wrote.
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