John Legend Opens Up About the ‘Challenges’ He & Chrissy Teigen Faced to Have Baby Esti

John Legend and Chrissy Teigen have been very open about the difficulties and heartbreaks they’ve had to endure to have more children, including fertility treatments and the nightmare of losing a pregnancy at 20 weeks. And in an appearance on The Jennifer Hudson Show, the “All Of Me” singer — who welcomed a daughter named Esti with the model in January — spoke about why he and his wife feel it’s so important to be candid about their highs and lows when it comes to such a sensitive topic.

“We’ve been open about it because we’ve had challenges, we’ve had to use IVF to conceive our children,” Legend told Hudson in the Thursday (Feb. 9) episode. “We’ve had the pregnancy loss. I think a lot of families go through that, but a lot of people were happy we talked about it because they didn’t feel so alone.”

“A lot of people go through this, and they go through it in silence,” he added. “I think Chrissy and I talking about it made people feel better about that journey.”

Legend and Teigen welcomed baby Esti Maxine — named after the Voice coach’s grandmother and great-grandmother, he told Hudson — on Jan. 13, giving 6-year-old daughter Luna and 4-year-old son Miles a little sister. “They’re being so good with her,” the 12-time Grammy winner told the host of his two older children.

“We were worried ’cause they seemed a little jealous when Chrissy was pregnant, and I was worried that they wouldn’t be excited to welcome her home,” he continued. “But they’ve exceeded our expectations of how loving and excited they are. They’re truly thrilled to be older siblings now.”

Esti’s arrival came a little over two years after Legend and the cookbook author had to say goodbye in 2020 to baby Jack, whom they lost when Teigen was 20 weeks pregnant. At the time, the couple explained to the public that they’d experienced a miscarriage. In September, however, Teigen shared that she’d actually had an abortion, something she didn’t fully realize until nearly two years later.

“When I was pregnant with Jack — John and my third child — I had to make a lot of difficult and heartbreaking decisions,” she said at Propper Daley’s “A Day of Unreasonable Conversation” summit. “It became very clear around halfway through that he would not survive, and that I wouldn’t either without any medical intervention.”

“Let’s just call it what it was: It was an abortion,” she continued at the time. “An abortion to save my life for a baby that had absolutely no chance. And to be honest, I never, ever put that together until, actually, a few months ago.”

Watch John Legend open up about his and Chrissy Teigen’s journey as parents above.