Her kids, her choice. Ashley Graham explained her decision to stop breast-feeding her 13-month-old twins — and she has no regrets.
“Overnight, my whole life changed,” the supermodel, 35, said during the Tuesday, February 7, episode of The Daily Show. “It felt like I was feeding a nation.”
The American Beauty Star host and husband Justin Ervin welcomed twins Malachi and Roman in January 2022, two years after the arrival of son Isaac, now 2. Graham told guest host Chelsea Handler that she exclusively breast-fed her eldest child, but she reconsidered the process after giving birth for the second time.
“There’s also this whole thing with people telling you how to feed your child,” the Nebraska native said. “So, with my first kid I was like, ‘I can only breastfeed! This is the right way!’ And then I had the twins, and I was like, ‘I’m not doing this. This is not working here. Both of you want both of these? This is a lot of work.'”
Graham decided to stop breast-feeding Malachi and Roman last year after they turned 5 months old and switched to “the best formula” she could find. “These little guys are so strong and so happy, so I don’t think we should be telling people how they should be feeding their kids,” she concluded.
Last year, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model revealed that she almost died from blood loss while giving birth to the twins at home. “The night I gave birth to the twins, I hemorrhaged,” she wrote in a May 2022 essay for Glamour. “We didn’t even have enough time to blow up the home birthing tub because everything happened so fast.”
After her sons arrived, Graham told her midwife that she didn’t “feel good” and needed to lie down. “I remember seeing darkness and what seemed like stars,” she wrote, adding that she lost “liters of blood” and wasn’t able to sit up when she first came to. “Thank goodness the twins were fine, while I lay on that bed for four straight days. I couldn’t walk for a week. And I didn’t leave my house for nearly two months.”
The A New Model author explained that she wanted to open up about her experience in the hope that it could help others in similar situations. “I tell you all of this — in pretty unflinching detail — because I believe in the importance of honesty; in revealing things about myself that I hope will help others talk about what they too have been through,” she said.
Graham also disclosed that she suffered a miscarriage before getting pregnant with her youngest children. “It was devastating; it felt like one of the biggest losses I had ever had in my life to date,” she wrote. “And I understood at that point what so many other mothers have gone through. And yet the world expects us to move on and handle our grief with grace. I just remember breaking down more than a few times, just at random, and thinking, ‘How do women across the world do this? Because my story is no bigger than anyone else’s.'”
