Dancing With the Stars alumi Peta Murgatroyd and Maks Chmerkovskiy have decided to tell the story of the three miscarriages they’ve endured while trying to give a sibling to their 5-year-old son, Shai.
The latest of these occurred dramatically, while Chmerkovskiy was back in his native Ukraine and Murgatroyd was so sick with Covid that she had to be hospitalized. It was in the hospital she learned that she had, again, been pregnant, and, again, had lost the baby, Murgatroyd told People.
Not learning that she was pregnant until after the pregnancy ended was easier on some level, Murgatroyd said. “I didn’t have that super joyous moment of, ‘I’m pregnant again!’” she said. “I just had the moment of, ‘You lost it.’”
Murgatroyd endured the first devastating loss in a Whole Foods bathroom in the fall of 2020. “It was so shocking and out of the blue,” she told People. “That was something that will probably live with me for the rest of my life, being on that toilet by myself, knowing what was happening and not being able to stop it.”
A second miscarriage, Murgatroyd said, occurred days before she was set to fly out to New York to share the news with Chmerkovskiy.
“After the second miscarriage, I said, ‘If there’s one more, that’s it. I’m not doing this again,’” said Murgatroyd.
When a third loss did occur, Murgatroyd found herself wondering, “When? Why me? Why can’t I have another child when it was so easy in the past?”
It was then that she decided to seek the counsel of a fertility specialist. While she was not given an explanation for the miscarriages, Murgatroyd was tentatively diagnosed with PCOS — polycystic ovarian syndrome, a hormonal imbalance that can impact fertility.
“For me, that was all and everything I needed to hear,” said Murgatroyd. Faced with the options of continuing to try to get pregnant naturally or pursue IVF treatment, Murgatroyd choose the latter. “Ultimately,” she said, “I wasn’t going to be happy waiting a couple of years.”
The couple are in the midst of an IVF cycle now. “So far it looks really, really promising,” Murgatroyd told People.
They decided to go public with their story after social media queries about having more children reached a peak. “I don’t usually get affected by social media stuff,” said Murgatroyd, but “it kind of hit a point with me.”
“There was one comment in particular,” she remembered, “that was like, ‘How could you not?’” which “threw me off the ledge,” she said. “If only you knew what was actually going on with my family, you would never say that.”
Sharing her story publicly, Murgatroyd explained, is freeing. “I feel like I can breathe now,” she said.
“To help even one individual who may be feeling a little bit ashamed, a little bit embarrassed about their situation, I feel like this has done its job.”
