*Warning: This article discusses pregnancy loss.
Years after enduring pregnancy loss, Anne Hathaway is talking more about her experience.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Anne Hathaway is opening up about the “infertility and conception hell” she talked briefly about in an Instagram post from 2019.
On July 24, 2019, Hathaway took to Instagram to reveal she was pregnant with her second child. “It’s not for a movie…#2,” Hathaway wrote, adding, “All kidding aside, for everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies. Sending you extra love.”
Now, nearly five years later, the actress is opening up about her decision to use her pregnancy announcement to let other people trying for a family know they aren’t alone. “Given the pain I felt while trying to get pregnant, it would’ve felt disingenuous to post something all the way happy when I know the story is much more nuanced than that for everyone,” Hathaway told Vanity Fair.
A year before welcoming her first child into the world, now 8-year-old Jonathan, Hathaway revealed that she suffered a miscarriage.
It was 2015 and the actress was performing in a one-woman off-Broadway show called Grounded, Hathaway explained to Vanity Fair. The show was about a “female U.S. Air Force pilot who is grounded when she gets pregnant.”
Little did the world know that Hathaway was pregnant as well. “The first time it didn’t work out for me, I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night,” she tells Vanity Fair.
“It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine,” Hathaway explained, adding that those closest to her knew what she was going through off stage. “I had to keep it real otherwise.”
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“So when it did go well for me, having been on the other side of it — where you have to have the grace to be happy for someone — I wanted to let my sisters know, ‘You don’t have to always be graceful. I see you and I’ve been you.'”
As Hathaway continued, she told Vanity Fair, “It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong.”
But as she began to research pregnancy loss, Hathaway quickly learned just how common her experience was. “I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That’s where we take on damage. So I decided that I was going to talk about it.”
“The thing that broke my heart, blew my mind, and gave me hope was that for three years after, almost daily, a woman came up to me in tears and I would just hold her, because she was carrying this [pain] around and suddenly it wasn’t all hers anymore.”
And if her pregnancy announcement in 2019 told us anything, it was Hathaway ridding herself of the shame she should have never held on to in the first place. “I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite norma.”
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