After suffering a miscarriage onstage, Halsey opens up about taking control of her fertility
Halsey might be 23, but she isn’t taking any chances when it comes to her future. The singer — who was diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition affecting fertility, in 2015 — recently opened up about her surprising decision to freeze her eggs at such as young age and how suffering an onstage miscarriage has given her a new perspective on her future.
On Thursday’s episode of The Doctors, Halsey revealed that she recently froze her eggs as a preemptive measure to protect her fertility. She also acknowledged her privilege in being able to afford to harvest, freeze and store her eggs — a process that can cost women tens of thousands of dollars.
“I’m 23 years old, and I’m going to freeze my eggs. And when I tell people that, they’re like, ‘You’re 23, why do you need to do that? Why do you need to freeze your eggs?’ Doing an ovarian reserve is important to me because I’m fortunate enough to have that as an option, but I need to be aggressive about protecting my fertility, about protecting myself,” Halsey said.
The singer’s decision to freeze her eggs was motivated by her yearslong battle with endometriosis, which Halsey initially mistook as standard period pains. “The thing with endometriosis is that it comes down to that doctors can tend to minimize the female experience when it comes to dealing with it,” Halsey said. “My whole life, my mother had always told me, ‘Women in our family just have really bad periods.’ It was just something she thought she was cursed to deal with and I was cursed to deal with, and that was just a part of my life.”
It wasn’t until she collapsed on tour and went to the doctor that she discovered that her pain wasn’t caused by dehydration or stress, but by endometriosis, a condition in which uterine tissue grows outside the uterus.
“My tour manager had to take me to a hospital. And the whole time I was there, no one knew what to tell me,” she said. “Dehydration, stress, anxiety and I was saying, ‘What about my pain?’ A lot of the time they can make you think it’s in your head. It was so bittersweet because it was the relief of knowing that I wasn’t making it 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.”
A few months after her diagnosis, while she was singing to a crowd of a few hundred teenagers, Halsey experienced a miscarriage onstage. The miscarriage, which happened not too long after she discovered she was pregnant, motivated Halsey to take her endometriosis more seriously and consider precautions to protect her future.
“I was on tour, and I found out I was pregnant. And before I could really figure out what that meant to me and what that meant for my future, for my career, for my life, for my relationship, the next thing I knew I was onstage miscarrying in the middle of my concert,” Halsey said. “And the sensation of looking a couple hundred teenagers in the face while you’re bleeding through your clothes and still having to do the show and realizing in that moment that I never want to make that choice ever again of doing what I love or not being able to because of this disease.”
Now, almost three years after her miscarriage, Halsey is ready to open up about her decision to freeze her eggs and why she isn’t letting her endometriosis stop her from having a family or hinder her future.
“Reproductive illness is so frustrating because it can really make you feel like less of a woman,” Halsey said. “There’s a lot of times when you’re sitting at home and you just feel so terrible about yourself. You’re sick, you don’t feel sexy, you don’t feel proud, you don’t feel like there’s much hope. And so taking these measures so that hopefully I can have a bright future and achieve the things that I want to achieve by doing the ovarian reserve is really important.”
Endometriosis affects nearly 176 million people across the world, including celebritieslike Julianne Hough and Jaime King. Props to Halsey for destigmatizing the condition and bravely opening up about her decision to freeze her eggs.
Originally posted on StyleCaster /SheKnows.
Image courtesy of GettyImages.
by Jason Pham
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