The Real Housewives of Orange County star Emily Simpson and her husband, Shane Simpson, navigated fertility struggles during the early days of their marriage.
“When Shane and I first got married 15 years ago, we started trying to have kids pretty early because I was 32 at the time,” Emily, now 48, recalled during a recent appearance on Scheana Shay’s “Scheananigans” podcast. “I remember at 32 thinking, like, ‘My clock is ticking.’”
She added, “I had multiple miscarriages — I don’t even know how many at this point, I think it was like five or six or something — just one after another after another. It got to the point where I did in vitro [fertilization].”
After an IVF cycle, Emily found out that she was pregnant with twins. She suffered a miscarriage in her second trimester.
“I’ll never forget I was at Costco and I was pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl. I was four months along and I remember saying to Shane, ‘I don’t feel right. Something feels wrong,’” Emily said. “Right when I said that, my water broke just all over the aisle. Of course, you know when you’re only four months pregnant and your water breaks, something is wrong.”
Emily and Shane then went to the local emergency room in Utah, where they were living at the time, and the Bravo star “had to go into labor.”
“I had to have them knowing that they weren’t going to survive,” she recalled. “It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever been through in my entire life. I remember crying the entire time to just holding onto [Shane] saying, ‘I’m never doing this again. I can’t go through this.’”
Emily ended up needing an emergency D&C and a blood transfusion.
“I had to stay in the hospital and it was horrific,” she added, noting that several days later she recounted the experience to her sister. “She said, ‘Please don’t do it again. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but your body just can’t do it.’ She said, ‘I’ll do it for you.’”
Emily’s sister, Sara Moffitt, who already had her own child at this point, then offered to be Emily and Shane’s surrogate.
“I still do this day don’t know what I could never actually carry,” Emily explained to podcast host Shay, 39. “It was traumatizing. It was the worst thing I’ve ever been through, so to look at my three children now, I always just think about my sister and how much she sacrificed.”
Moffitt carried all three of the Simpsons’ children: Annabelle, 11, and twins Luke and Keller, both 9. (Shane also shares eldest daughters Shelby and Chanel from a past relationship.)
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