Ann Romney’s Multiple Miscarriages and Pro-Life Conversion

In a new interview aired on CBS, Ann Romney, the wife of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, shared a personal moment in talking about the multiple miscarriages she suffered and how they affected her life and the life of her family.

Romney had the miscarriages in her 40s and the couple’s youngest son was reportedly devastated by the news, collapsing in tears in front of his mother as she informed him of the loss of one of her babies before birth. Mitt Romney himself had not heard the story of his son’s reaction until Ann Romney shared it with CBS.

Ann Romney talked about how their son Craig, the youngest of the five boys the Romneys have, really wanted a little brother or sister and was “thrilled” when she a announced she was pregnant. She was four and a half months pregnant at the time it happened.

“You know, I [had] sort of told him, ‘I’m sorry, but that, you know, there’s no more children in our future.’ So, he was thrilled to death” when he was told about her pregnancy, said Ann Romney.

“I knew I was losing the baby. It was about three or four in the morning and I decided that I wasn’t going to wake Mitt up,” Mrs. Romney says in the upcoming interview. “I waited until it was about six in the morning and I said, ‘Mitt, you gotta take me to the hospital right now.'”

“I was home by the time Craig got home from school in the afternoon and he walked in the door and he was about ten or 11 years old and he fell on the floor and he just burst into tears,” she added. “And the poor little kid had been at school all day long holding this sorrow inside of him and having no one to speak to, no one to comfort him, no one to explain what is going on.”

“I said, ‘You know, Craig, you know, you’re probably not going to have another little brother or little sister in your life, but you’ll have children of your own someday. And, you know, this little hole will be filled by that,'” said Ann Romney in the CBS interview. “And the interesting thing: He married a woman who had younger, much younger brothers. And when I saw Craig playing with those younger brothers, I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t life interesting. He got those little brothers. He had to just wait a while.'”

According to CBS, Mitt Romney said he “hadn’t heard the story of Craig coming home from school that day and being so devastated.”

“I’m not surprised. He’s a very tender heart and a wonderful father today himself,” he added.

Ann Romney’s health has come up before in the campaign as voters get to know her as well as her husband. Ann has battled multiple sclerosis since 1998 and fought an early-stage breast cancer diagnosis in 2008.

In 2007, Ann Romney said she no longer supports abortion and joins her husband, Republican presidential candidate Mitt, in taking a pro-life viewpoint.

Ann Romney told Fox News that what is important now is that both she and her husband are pro-life and actively promoting the pro-life perspective. She also said that she became pro-life at the same time as Mitt after evaluating the issue of embryonic stem cell research.

“So I’ve had to make a decision, a personal decision, on this, and it came pretty much at the same time with Mitt, with feeling about M.S. and research dollars and everything else, as to the value of life and experimentation on life,” Mrs. Romney said.

“And it gave me pause at that time to say whose life is more important, and I had to come out on the side of life when it came for me making a real personal decision about research dollars going to creating new human life for experimentation,” she concluded.

Steven Ertelt