Jessa Duggar Admits It Was ‘Very Hard’ to ‘Get Attached’ to Pregnancy After Miscarriages: ‘It Is Scary’

Jessa Seewald (née Duggar) reflected on her struggles with anxiety after experiencing two miscarriages over the course of two years.

As she navigates her pregnancy with her sixth child, she confessed it’s become difficult to “allow” herself to “feel excited” about positive tests after going through the heartbreaking losses in 2020 and 2022.

“It is scary,” the soon-to-be mother of six – who shares Spurgeon, 9, Henry, 8, Ivy, 6, Fern, 3, and George, 18 months, with husband Ben Seewald – said on a recent installment of her sister’s Jinger and Jeremy podcast. “You feel like you’re bracing yourself. You’re like, ‘This may go how it went last time.’”

While her miscarriages were not back-to-back, she “definitely felt that” fear until she would get past “the marker of where I lost my last baby.”

“It was very hard for me to feel like, really emotionally invested, or to, like, get attached because I was, like, ‘Any second, this could be gone,’ and you’re terrified,” she continued. “I mean, just, like, basically every time you go to the bathroom, you’re like, ‘Is there blood? Like, am I? Am I losing this baby?’ And so that’s, like, the hard side.”

Despite the pain of the losses, Jessa, 32, revealed that the experiences allowed her to take “a lot less for granted” when it came to the ups and downs of her next pregnancies.

“You know, when those pregnancy symptoms of, like, nausea or whatever, like, went past into the second trimester with one of my babies, I was like, ‘This is going on really long.’ But then I thought, ‘but it stopped short with the other baby that I lost. And like, I wouldn’t have it any other way,’” she recalled. “I’m thankful even for, like, hard aspects of pregnancy because your baby’s still there and you’re still pregnant. I feel like it just caused me to be so much more grateful and to cherish life even more.”

Her younger sister Joy-Anna Forsyth (née Duggar) – who shares Gideon, 7, Evelyn, 4, and Gunner, 2, with husband Austin Forsyth – agreed that she felt similarly following the stillbirth of her daughter Annabell, who passed away in utero at 20 weeks in 2019.

“I would have this, like, battle in my mind, almost, of, like, ‘I’m so scared. I’m not going to get excited.’ But then I would go to the other side of, like, ‘Well, I don’t need to be controlled by that,’” she explained. “I need to be, like, God’s given us life, and it’s not in my control, so I’m going to trust him. And then the next day I’d be like, ‘But what if this happens?’ And so it was constant.”

However, Joy-Anna, 27, found solace in the fact that she got pregnant with her daughter Evy roughly six months after her miscarriage.

“We wouldn’t have been able to have Annabell and Evelyn,” she said. “So, for me, looking back… obviously, it hurt to go through that loss, but we wouldn’t have Evy today if we hadn’t have lost Annabell.”