Actor James Van Der Beek, known for his role in the ’90s drama “Dawson’s Creek,” recently opened up about his wife’s 2019 miscarriage and the emotional toll the tragedy took on both of them.
The 46-year-old celebrity spoke candidly about the experience on the “Bathroom Chronicles” podcast.
When his wife Kimberly had the miscarriage, Van Der Beek was competing on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars.” She was 17-and-a-half-weeks pregnant and something just felt “off,” he recalled.
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“It was just so much pain,” Van Der Beek said, “and it was so unexpected, because everything was right, everything was a fairy tale. Everything was coming together perfectly. It progressed very quickly into being worried about Kim. We were both just crying and sobbing and there was a lot of blood — way more blood than any delivery.”
He remembered his wife lying down in the shower and not waking up.
“That’s when I called 911,” the celebrity said, remembering his decision to stay home with their five other children while Kimberly was taken to the hospital.
“You were gone,” Van Der Beek said on the podcast, talking to his wife. “The ambulance had taken you away. I got Gwen back to bed. And I’m just sitting there in a bathroom full of blood. And, dead little baby on the counter. It was just a gut punch — an emotional gut punch.”
Despite the devastation he and his wife had just endured, the “Dawson’s Creek” star finished out the rest of the “DWTS” competition, at Kimberly’s insistence.
This is not the first time Van Der Beek has spoken out about miscarriage, which he argued in 2018 should be renamed.
“‘Miscarriage,’ in an insidious way, suggests fault for the mother — as if she dropped something, or failed to ‘carry,’” the actor wrote on Instagram, CBN News reported. “From what I’ve learned, in all but the most obvious, extreme cases, it has nothing to do with anything the mother did or didn’t do.”
Van Der Beek, whose wife has suffered three miscarriages, said society should come up with a new term for the tragic experience, one that eliminates “all blame” for the unintentional loss of an unborn child.
The Van Der Beeks — who recently relocated from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas — have six children.
According to the March of Dimes, between 10-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage and roughly 80% of those happen within the first trimester, before the 12th week of pregnancy. Miscarriages, it should be noted, are defined as pregnancy losses before the 20-week mark.
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