Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is opening up about his wife’s miscarriage, saying he “found it difficult to grieve” during the “surreal” experience.
“My wife and I lost our first child in a miscarriage just a few days after Erin watched the baby’s heartbeat for the first time,” Hawley writes in his book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” released Tuesday.
The 43-year-old lawmaker recalled finding out the devastating news a decade ago, the morning after he and his wife, attorney Erin Morrow Hawley, spent the night unpacking boxes as they moved into their first home together outside of Columbia, Mo.
“She woke me the next morning in tears. ‘I’ve lost the baby,’ she said.”
“We went to the hospital together a short time later, and after a few moments with the sonogram, the nurse shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But the baby isn’t there,’” Hawley wrote.
“We never learned whether our child was a son or daughter. Erin always believed the baby was a girl, and she would know better than anyone else. She had carried the child for nearly three months and felt her, or his, life intertwining with her own,” he recounted in the book.
While he described the loss for his wife as “tangible and profound,” Hawley said for him, the “entire train of events seemed somehow surreal.”
“Before, when Erin first told me she was pregnant, I could hardly fathom we were going to have a baby, wonderful as the news was. Now I could hardly fathom that he, or she, was gone. There had been no moment at which I met my child; now there was no moment to say goodbye,” he said.
“It was almost as if none of it had ever happened. I found it difficult to grieve or to feel much of anything. It was like watching a movie of someone else’s life.”
The pair, Hawley said, didn’t choose a name for their child and were left feeling that they didn’t know what to do: “The thing about miscarriages, we soon learned, is people rarely speak about them. It’s not the sort of thing one shares with those who don’t already know about the baby’s impending arrival, and since our miscarriage occurred relatively early, that wasn’t very many people.”
The experience, he said, led him to the realization that his childhood dream of becoming a father wasn’t something he “could control.”
“The waiting and wondering in those months after we lost our baby forced me into a new position of humility and dependence. Fatherhood was something beyond me. I had to wait for it and hope for it.”
Three months later, Morrow Hawley, who is part of the legal team aiming to end the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone as part of a federal lawsuit in Texas, discovered she was pregnant again.
“I found I was subconsciously counting the days to week 10, when we had lost our first. But that week came and went, and the baby grew.”
Hawley’s wife, author of the book, “Living Beloved — Lessons from My Little Ones,” gave birth to their son, Elijah, in 2012. The couple have two other children, Blaise, 7, and Abigail, 2.
Holding Elijah for the first time, Hawley wrote, was “both an end and a beginning.”
“I felt released, at last, to say goodbye to the child I had never seen. And I felt an overwhelming gratitude for another opportunity to be a father.”