Why Elizabeth Smart Kept the Birth of Her Daughter a Secret
Elizabeth Smart, who has made fighting sex crimes against children her life’s work, at a news conference in April. The former kidnapping victim is now the mother of a 3-month-old girl. (Photo: Rick Bowmer/AP Photo)
Almost 13 years to the day she was kidnapped from her childhood home in Utah and held captive for nine months by a sexual predator and his wife, Elizabeth Smart is back in the headlines: she’s a new mom.
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Her father, Ed Smart, confirmed last week that the 27-year-old and husband Matthew Gilmour welcomed a daughter in February. “Elizabeth is great,” Smart told East Idaho News. “She just had a baby girl named Chloe about three months ago.”
If you didn’t know that Elizabeth was pregnant or had given birth, credit Elizabeth herself, who purposely kept the story out of the public eye. In an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, her father added, “It is totally private. This is something she is keeping to herself and not trying to have out there.”
Baby Chloe’s arrival is fab news, especially since Elizabeth has never hid the fact that she hoped to start a family. In an interview with People last year, she said “that is my greatest aspiration—to be a mother.”
In the years since she was reunited with her family and bravely testified at her captor’s trial (Brian David Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison in 2011), Elizabeth has remained in the spotlight. She wrote a book about her ordeal, got married in 2012, and has became an activist who fights against sex trafficking and the sexual abuse of children.
Despite her status as a public figure, experts say it’s not surprising that Elizabeth opted to keep her pregnancy and the birth of her child private.
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“There’s no more vulnerable time in a woman’s life than when she has a baby,” Dr. Wendy Walsh, a Los Angeles–based psychologist, tells Yahoo Parenting. “Hormones kick in that heighten that protective instinct.”
Smart with her husband, Matthew Gilmour (Photo: Photo: Robin Oelkers/NBC/NBC NewsWire/Getty Images)
In Elizabeth’s case, that sense of protectiveness is even more intense, says Williams. “Because she was kidnapped and held against her will, it’s not an irrational fear to her that this could happen to her child.” Keeping news of her baby out of the spotlight gives her an extra sense of security that it can’t happen again.
Keeping the news private also allows her to control the attention Chloe is likely to get from the public, something Elizabeth probably learned from her own family, who shielded her from media attention in the years following her abduction.
“This is a family that used the media when they needed to to bring her home, but they didn’t let the media manipulate them; they kept control and allowed Elizabeth time to recover and heal and be a regular teenager,” says Walsh.
There’s another thing to consider, Walsh says. Elizabeth survived nine months of sexual abuse as an adolescent. “Research shows that some victims of child sexual abuse tend to have challenges when it comes to childbirth and delivery, because these experiences might bring on flashbacks to the abuse,” she says.
It’s not known if this was Elizabeth’s experience, but if it was, it makes sense that she would crave private, media-free time to recover and enjoy being a new mom.
Her father sees redemption in Chloe’s birth. “We want all of those people that have been victimized out there to be survivors,“ Smart told East Idaho News. "We want them to find their dreams and find that new hope in life that helps them become the best and the most they can be.”
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