Ashley Graham Pens An Essay About Nearly Dying From Giving Birth To Her Twins And Enduring A "Devastating" Miscarriage Last Year

Graham and her husband Justin Ervin welcomed their first boy into the world two years ago, and recently she shared that she also gave birth to twins. When Graham first shared photos of her twin boys, it seemed from the outside that the birth went smoothly, but it turns out things didn't exactly go according to plan. She penned an essay for Glamour that details her near-death experience.

Ashley Graham Nearly Died from Giving Birth to Her Twins

Graham's labor for the twin boys only lasted three and a half hours, and when both of them arrived safely, she and her team were thrilled with the result. Then she started to feel weird.

"The next thing you know, I looked at my midwife and I said, 'I don’t feel good. I think I need to lay down,' and I blacked out," she wrote. "All I can remember is feeling a light touch on my cheek, which I found out later was actually somebody smacking the crap out of my cheek, someone holding my hand, my husband Justin in my ear, praying, and someone jabbing me with a needle in my arm. And I remember seeing darkness and what seemed like stars."

When she came to, she saw everybody around her, and everyone assured her that she was okay. But she had actually "lost liters of blood," and the midwife had to "press her finger down right above my vagina bone to try and stop the bleeding." They also struggled to find a vein in her arm to administer Pitocin, which can help with excess bleeding post-birth.

"I looked around the room, saw blood literally everywhere, and let out this deep, visceral cry—an emotional release from the chaos I had just experienced," she wrote.

Graham pulled through and they were able to stop the bleeding, but she couldn't get out of bed for four days straight, she didn't walk for a week, and she didn't leave the house for almost two months. She expressed her gratitude to her midwives for saving her life.

Ashley Graham Suffered a Miscarriage Last Year

In the essay, Graham also shared news that she had never spoken about before. "I fell pregnant in January of 2021, on my husband’s birthday," she wrote. "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."

Graham says it "was devastating" and "felt like one of the biggest losses I had ever had in my life to date." Even though she found solace in her first son Isaac, "the loss was so acute." She thinks about all the moms who have gone through multiple miscarriages.

"And yet the world expects us to move on and handle our grief with grace," she said. "I just remember breaking down more than a few times, just at random, and thinking, 'How do women across the world do this? Because my story is no bigger than anyone else’s.'"

Thankfully, she fell pregnant with her twins not long after the miscarriage. Graham writes about all her experiences because she knows that there are millions of women out there who have gone through a similar experience and they deserve to know they're not alone.