How Halsey spoke openly about miscarriage, reproductive health before surprise pregnancy announcement

Halsey managed to shock the world with a pregnancy announcement on Wednesday, sharing photos of her growing bump on Instagram. But it isn’t the first time that fans of the singer have heard about her desire to become a mother. The 26-year-old has been open about reproductive health and experiencing a miscarriage.

The New Jersey native most recently spoke about dealing with endometriosis — a painful disorder in which tissue similar to the tissue that normally lines the inside of one’s uterus grows outside of it, according to the Mayo Clinic — and efforts to freeze her eggs when she released the song “More” on her latest album that spoke to her own journey to motherhood.

“For a long time, I didn’t think that having a family was something I was going to be able to do, and it’s very, very important to me. Then one day my ob-gyn tells me it’s looking like I maybe can, and I was so moved. It felt like this ascension into a different kind of womanhood. All of a sudden, everything is different,” she wrote in her “Manic” album notes for Apple Music. “I'm not going to go tour myself to death because I have nothing else to do and I’m overcompensating for not being able to have this other thing that I really want. Now, I have a choice. I’ve never had a choice before. Lido [the producer Peder Losnegård] and I built the fading instrumental at the end of the song to sound like a sonogram, like you were hearing the sounds from inside a womb. It’s one of the most special songs I've ever made.”

The hopeful sentiment was a special one for Halsey and her fans. The singer has long documented issues with her reproductive health, beginning in 2016 when she revealed her diagnosis.

She became even more candid about her struggles in a July 2016 profile for Rolling Stone, when she opened up about experiencing a miscarriage the year prior. She was on the road touring when it happened.

“I think that the reason it happened is just the lifestyle I was living. I wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t doing drugs. I was f***ing overworked – in the hospital every couple of weeks because I was dehydrated, needing bags of IVs brought to my greenroom. I was anemic, I was fainting. My body just broke the f*** down,” Halsey told the publication, explaining that it was easy to blame herself for what had happened. “I want to be a mom more than I want to be a pop star. More than I want to be anything in the world.”

The singer referenced the tragedy in a poem titled “A Story Like Mine” that she wrote for the 2018 Women’s March in New York City. “I put on a diaper and sang out my spleen to a room full of teens,” she said about the night in Chicago in 2015.

Halsey went on to speak about the severity of her endometriosis symptoms and the difficulty in receiving a proper diagnosis when she appeared on an episode of The Doctors in 2018.

“It was so bittersweet because it was like the relief of knowing that I wasn’t making it all up and I wasn’t being sensitive and it wasn’t all in my head. But it also kind of sucked to know that I was going to be living with this forever,” she said of the diagnosis.

After miscarrying on stage just a couple of months later, she decided to take proper steps to seek more aggressive treatment. “I was like, ‘I never want to have to make that choice ever again [between] doing what I love or not being able to because of this disease,” she said at the time. “I had surgery a year ago and I feel a lot better.”

In a follow-up interview with Rolling Stone in 2019, the singer explained that the surgery and other lifestyle changes meant that she would no longer have to freeze her eggs — something that she had planned to do over concerns that her endometriosis wouldn’t allow her to carry a child to term. “I was like, ‘Wait, what did you just say? Did you just say I can have kids?’” she recalled from a conversation with her doctor. “It was like the reverse of finding out you have a terminal illness. I called my mom, crying.”

In a February 2020 interview with the Guardian, Halsey reflected on her miscarriage and the online abuse that resulted from her speaking so openly about it as “the most inadequate I’ve ever felt.” In turn, she called her latest prognosis “a miracle,” saying that motherhood is “looking like something that’s gonna happen for me.”

Nearly one year later, Halsey revealed that blessing on Instagram.

“Surprise,” she captioned her pregnancy announcement, tagging writer and producer Alev Aydin in the post. She later took to Twitter writing, “my rainbow.”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• Amy Schumer explains decision to do IVF: ‘I, for my safety, cannot be pregnant again’

• Chrissy Teigen shares frustration after pregnancy loss: 'I have no idea why I still have this bump'

• Jodie Turner-Smith says childbirth is 'goddess-level s***'

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