Anne Hathaway Slams the Way Women Feel ‘Unnecessarily Isolated’ After a Miscarriage in a Raw New Interview

The death of a loved one, especially when it’s a child, is met with sympathy, a showering of love and support (and casseroles), and time to mourn. Yet, when that death happens before a baby is born, it’s often treated as something shameful or embarrassing that should be hidden and kept secret — even as you try your best to carry on like nothing happened. It’s a double heartbreak: first, for the loss of your baby, and second for the loss of yourself because you don’t really feel like part of you if you are keeping something so big hidden. Anne Hathaway, who has experienced miscarriage herself, slammed these cultural norms that make women feel “unnecessarily isolated” in a raw new interview, and we are praising her bravery for speaking up about it!

The Idea of You star, who is mom to Jonathan, 8, and Jack, 4, with husband Adam Shulman, experienced a miscarriage during her one-woman off-Broadway show of Grounded. “The first time [I got pregnant] it didn’t work out for me,” Hathaway told Vanity Fair in a new cover interview. “I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night,” she explained. After holding it together for that painful experience, she broke down when her friends visited her backstage at the end of the night. “It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine. I had to keep it real otherwise … 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,’” she continued. “It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong.”

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The Devil Wears Prada actress shared that many of her friends revealed they had gone through similar experiences, and she found a study that showed up to 50 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage (The March of Dimes suggest 30 percent overall, whereas the Mayo Clinic breaks down your risk by age, with women 35 and under having a 20 percent risk; 35-40 having a 33-40% risk; and at 45 and older having a 57-80% risk).

“I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That’s where we take on damage,” Hathaway told the outlet. “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.”

Hathaway opened up about her fertility struggles when she announced her second pregnancy in 2019. “It’s not for a movie … #2,” she captioned a photo of her baby bump, 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 💕”

She told Vanity Fair that her reasoning behind that post was: “more about what I wasn’t going to do.” Hathaway said, “I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal.”

In an Aug. 2019 interview with Daily Mail, the Ocean’s Eight star said about the Instagram post, “I just remembered how I felt when I was struggling myself.” She continued, “Each time I was trying to get pregnant and it wasn’t going my way, someone else would manage to conceive. I knew intellectually that it didn’t happen just to torment me, but, to be honest, it felt a little bit like it did.”

“What made matters worse was that I was embarrassed to feel like that because there was no conversation to be had about it,” Hathaway continued. “This is something people don’t talk about, and I think they should. So, when I was writing that post, I was thinking about that one follower I might reach, the woman who’s in hell about this and can’t figure out why it’s not happening for her. She’s going to see my announcement and, while I understand she will be happy for me, I also know that something about it will make her feel worse. I just wanted to say: ‘Look, this wasn’t as easy for me as it looks.’”

Hearing from other women going through the same thing helped her too. “Of course, my husband was there with me every step of the way, but I was also amazed at the number of women in my life who were brave enough to share their stories with me,” Hathaway continued. “When I said to them: ‘This has happened to me, it broke my heart, it broke me,’ so many of them said: ‘It happened to me, too,’ and that was the thing that allowed me to come through it, to feel my pain without having anyone rush in to define it or cure it. To be able to understand what was going on beyond blaming myself or blaming my body.”

She added, “We women who have come through this have become a sisterhood — but, until now, it has been a silent sisterhood, and I would like it not to be.”

The Les Misérables star wants people to know that all pregnancies don’t have a happy ending. “There’s this tendency to portray getting pregnant, having kids, in one light, as if it’s all positive,” she told WSJ Magazine in March 2022. “But I know from my own experience, it’s so much more complicated than that.”

“When you find out that your pain is shared by others, you just think, ‘I just feel that’s helpful information to have, so I’m not isolated in my pain,’” she continued. “I mean, what is there to be ashamed of? This is grief, and that’s a part of life.”

These other famous parents have been open about suffering miscarriages.

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