John Legend: Chrissy Teigen’s miscarriage made abortion rights issue ‘poignant’

US musician John Legend has defended abortion rights in America, saying his wife Chrissy Teigen needed abortion care while experiencing a miscarriage to “make sure she didn’t die”.

Model and cookbook author Teigen suffered a miscarriage with the couple’s third child in September 2020, who they named Jack.

Two years ago, the US Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion in the country.

In an interview with BBC’s Newsnight on Thursday, Legend said that although the couple had “always believed that it was important for women and their families and their doctors to make these intimate reproductive decisions” without government intervention, their experience with miscarriage made the issue of abortion rights “particularly poignant”.

“We were losing our pregnancy, a pregnancy we wanted, a baby we wanted, we were losing him and we had to have abortion care to resolve that, to make sure that Chrissy didn’t die,” he said.

“She was bleeding profusely, and her life needed to be saved, and we had to have abortion care to do that. And having that experience really informed us about the range of reasons that people may need an abortion, and how intrusive it would be for the government to have any say in that kind of conversation and that decision.”

He continued: “Could you imagine us going through the tragedy of losing a pregnancy, the physical duress that Chrissy was going through to resolve that and having to deal with, at the same time, legal red tape, out of concern that the doctors might get arrested, or that she might get arrested for doing what they needed to do to preserve her life?

“It’s unconscionable that we would put any woman through that, and that is literally happening right now in Texas and other states around the country that have taken away women’s rights to abortion.”

The couple have four children together, Luna, Miles, Esti and Wren, who was born via surrogate.