TVC E. Actress Ashley Williams has opened up about a miscarriage she suffered earlier this year.
The Something Borrowed star has penned a candid essay for the Human Development Project, revealing she lost her baby eight weeks into her second pregnancy.
In the article, the 37-year-old admits she felt helpless after the tragedy, and listening to medical professionals use terms like “abnormality”, “defect”, and “not viable” to describe the loss only “feeds more self-sabotaging thoughts that I am deficient”.
It took a while for her to realise there was nothing she could have done to avoid the heartbreaking loss, which she learned affects one in four pregnant women in her age group, and it’s a message she wants others in similar circumstances to accept, too.
“My (still bloated) gut feeling is that something even more painful silences us – the fear that we, as women, are failures,” she writes. “Procreation, the driving purpose in our constructed notion of womanhood, is broken by this sudden trauma.”
“You are not broken. You did nothing wrong,” she continues. “You are strong, you are brave, and there is hope.”
Ashley and her producer husband Neal Dodson are already parents to son Gus, who turns two in October (16).
The couple wed in 2011 at the Tennessee home of her sister Kimberly Williams-Paisley and her country singer husband Brad Paisley.