NEED TO KNOW
Kate Gosselin is opening up about her experiences with infertility and pregnancy loss.
The nurse and former reality star, 50, started a TikTok account in July. Since then, she’s been sharing more information about her life — and her eight kids’ lives — with her followers. In a new six-part TikTok series, the mom opened up about her “infertility, pregnancy and birth journey,” recalling how she was initially pregnant with seven children, not six, before giving birth to her sextuplets in 2004.
When Kate was six weeks pregnant, she had her first ultrasound, and said in part four of the TikTok series — posted on Wednesday, Sept. 3 — that her seventh baby did not survive to the next one. “In between that time,” she told her followers, “the seventh baby stopped growing.”
“Along the way, there was another emergency,” said the nurse, who shares her kids with ex-husband Jon Gosselin, 48. “At some point, I started bleeding. I, of course, thought this was the beginning of a miscarriage. I was losing them all.”
The Jon & Kate Plus 8 alum went into the emergency room and got another ultrasound, during which the technician “got really quiet,” Kate said. “Here we go. It’s done,” she recalled thinking to herself, adding, “I was really scared.”
Then, “all of the sudden,” the technician said she saw “six heartbeats” on the screen. “I literally, at that point, that was the moment I knew I was committed to these babies,” she recalled, “because I realized the relief — and I started sobbing — that came over me. From that point on, I was in it, I was going to fight for them, I was going to do whatever.”
“Not that I wasn’t before,” she continued, “but just the fact that it was dangled, [that] I was threatened with losing them, it made me realize how much I already loved them. So that was very miraculous.”
Kate later added while replying to a comment that she’s “always thought” the seventh baby was a girl. “Her name would have been Emma,” she added.
Heidi Gutman/NBC NewsWire
The mom of eight previously opened up about the pregnancy loss in her book I Just Want You to Know: Letters to My Kids on Love, Faith, and Family, published in 2010. She mentioned the loss in her letter to sextuplet Alexis, she said in a previous talk show appearance, because “she, of all my kids, reminds me of our seventh baby,” despite Kate only mentioning it “once or twice, here or there.”
“For whatever reason, she grasped onto that, and she still asks,” Kate said at the time. “And you have to understand, I had my hands full with sextuplets. … but one day when they were like 1 or 2, it occurred to me that I was so busy in that moment that that was a loss that we suffered, but I didn’t spend time maybe grieving or dealing with the fact that there was a seventh baby.”
“And to a lot of people, that would sound ridiculous, because they would say, ‘Oh my gosh, you had six, like, five more than you were planning on, what are you wasting your time thinking about…’ But that was a life that was created, who we don’t have. So it makes you wonder, like, ‘Who would this baby have been?’ ”
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Kate and Jon first welcomed twin girls Mady and Cara in 2000, and later welcomed their sextuplets — Alexis, Hannah, Aaden, Collin, Leah and Joel — in 2004. The twins are now 24 and the sextuplets are 21.
The family’s unique dynamics were the basis for their TLC show — and claim to fame — Jon & Kate Plus 8. The series, which ran from 2007 to 2017, followed the pair as they raised their kids in Pennsylvania. It was later renamed Kate Plus 8, however, after the couple split. In June 2009, Kate filed for divorce following cheating allegations surrounding Jon.
