No More Isolation: Why More Women are Sharing Pregnancy News During the First Trimester

We’ve talked about miscarriage a lot on ForEveryMom. Whether it be Carrie Underwood opening up about the three miscarriages she’s suffered, or even men like James Van Der Beek weighing in on the heartache and grief that comes with the traumatic loss of a baby.

And let’s not soon forget that viral video of Olympian Shawn East Johnson and her husband Andrew East sharing the raw and heartbreaking aftermath of suffering from miscarriage.

Experts say 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage.

But for decades, couples have [hidden] behind the shame of miscarriage as if it could have been prevented, or they did something wrong to lose the baby. But we want to erase that stigma.

Traditionally, people have waited until after about 12 weeks to announce their pregnancy, with the hope that any significant chance for miscarriage would have passed.

But as life presses on, a trend we have seen repeatedly is more and more women announcing their pregnancy early, despite the fact that they may later also have to announce their miscarriage.

After learning she was pregnant with her first child last year, Katie Rollins shared the news on social media.

“Right when we found out, so at five weeks,” Katie told TODAY Parents. “We had been trying for a year, so we got excited and didn’t wait to tell people.”

Not long after their big announcement, Katie also learned that she and her husband were expecting a baby girl. They did a live gender-reveal video celebrating their daughter-to-be.

But shortly after that, Katie suffered a miscarriage.

“I wish I didn’t tell the world, because having to tell the world she’s gone now makes it feel a thousand times worse,” she wrote on Facebook last November. “But here we are, this is part of it too. I love and appreciate the support and am not ready to talk about it but thank you for being there.”

In the weeks that followed, more than 300 people commented on Katie’s post offering up incredible support and giving her comfort in a heartbreaking process.

“The … incredible thing that came out of having a miscarriage was realizing how many other people were in my corner who went through that minefield before me and shared so that I did not feel alone,” she wrote in a post several weeks later.

Thousands followed along with Hilaria Baldwin a few years back as she publicly suffered a miscarriage. The podcaster, mother of seven and wife to actor Alec Baldwin posted about her miscarriage in real time — literally as it was happening. She suffered another miscarriage in November at four months along.