Ellen DeGeneres Forced Mariah Carey to Reveal Her Pregnancy On Air — & Then She Miscarried
Mariah Carey is just one of many brave celebs who have spoken out about their miscarriage experiences, and this week she’s sharing more of the difficult story than ever before. Carey told Vulture this week that in 2008, she was actually forced to reveal her pregnancy to the public much earlier than she wanted to — on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, at the host’s insistence. Yeah, we’re feeling uncomfortable about this story already, too.
“I was extremely uncomfortable with that moment is all I can say,” Carey told the publication. “And I really have had a hard time grappling with the aftermath.”
The moment she’s referring to is an interview she did on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2008. Carey was married to Nick Cannon the time, and during the interview, DeGeneres asked if they’d be expecting a baby together anytime soon. Carey tried to change the subject, but DeGeneres wasn’t having it; she gave Carey an alcoholic beverage to supposedly prove whether or not she was pregnant based on whether or not she drank it. (PSA: A sip of champagne on a TV show is extremely unlikely to have any effect on your fetus! Pregnant people should not be shamed for drinking, nor should any people be shamed for revealing or not revealing something that’s happening with their bodies, like, you know, pregnancy!).
“This is peer pressure,” Carey says on the show. The audience laughs, Carey fakes drinking the champagne, and DeGeneres exclaims, “You’re pregnant!”
“I wasn’t ready to tell anyone because I had had a miscarriage,” Carey told Vulture this week about the uncomfortable interview. “I don’t want to throw anyone that’s already being thrown under any proverbial bus, but I didn’t enjoy that moment.”
She added that there is “an empathy that can be applied to those moments that I would have liked to have been implemented. But what am I supposed to do?”
“Literally, the day we were supposed to travel to Aspen we had an ultrasound,” Nick Cannon said on Access Hollywood in 2010 of the pregnancy loss two years prior. “Unfortunately that was a time where [the doctor] said, ‘I’m sorry but the pregnancy is unsuccessful.’”
“It was really sad,” Carey added on the same episode. “We had really to absorb this… We really learned a lot just as people. It was even more of, like, preparing us to do this because of the way it happened so quickly at first. I think I was sort of in shock because I didn’t expect [the pregnancy]… and then when that happened and I wasn’t able to even talk to anybody about it, that was not OK, that was not easy.”
The bottom line here? Pregnant people should announce said pregnancy if and when they want to — and only if and when they want to, and on their own terms. Whether they want to tell the world when they’re a mere five weeks pregnant or keep the whole thing a secret until they’ve got a baby to show for it, there’s no wrong answers. Well, actually there is one wrong answer, and that’s pressuring someone to reveal their pregnancy in public before they’re ready. So.
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