Bachelor in Paradise’s Jade Roper is opening up about what may have led to her miscarriage earlier this year.
“Our sweet Beau was diagnosed with Down syndrome, so we think his tiny heart wasn’t strong enough,” Roper, 36, wrote via an Instagram Story Q&A on Wednesday, November 1, after a fan asked what had potentailly “caused” her recent pregnancy loss. “A lot of DS diagnoses are accompanied with congenital heart conditions.”
Roper — who shares three children with husband Tanner Tolbert — announced in August that she had miscarried her fourth child, a son named Beau. (The couple, who tied the knot in 2016 after meeting on BiP season 2, welcomed daughter Emerson in 2017, son Brooks in 2019 and son Reed in 2020.)
“I’ve been struggling [with] what to write here as I’ve been navigating a miscarriage,” Roper wrote via Instagram at the time. “It felt like all my dreams were coming true to welcome another baby into our lives, to love and to complete our family. While our hearts [are] completely broken and we have been dealing with the deep and complex grief of the loss, we have been blessed to be touched by his soul for his short amount of time. I am forever changed.”
She explained to her followers at the time that she was experiencing a “missed miscarriage,” which meant that while “his heart has stopped and he has stopped growing (for some time now) my body hasn’t released the pregnancy yet.” She noted that she was “hoping to do this naturally” and avoid any medical intervention.
However, after sharing news of the pregnancy loss, Roper was briefly hospitalized due to a possible infection. The lab results came back normal, but she eventually went into surgery weeks later.
“Well, here we are. I didn’t want or expect it to go this way, but it is,” she wrote via Instagram after the surgery. “I so badly wanted to bury him under a beautiful tree in our yard, to see any glimpse of his tiny body, which is why I held out so long trying to trust my body. But, it is time to heal and get to the other side of this loss.”
The following month, Roper described her experience during an Instagram Story Q&A after a social media user asked how she recognized that she was miscarrying. She shared that she didn’t have “any symptoms” besides that she “stopped feeling pregnant in certain ways” and had an “inner knowing” where she “felt he was gone.”
Roper has been open about her fertility struggles over the years. The “Mommies Tell All” podcast host — who got engaged to Tolbert during the season 2 finale of BiP, which premiered in August 2015 — got pregnant while on the ABC dating series but didn’t find out until she was back visiting her then-fiancé in Kansas City.
“I just knew that I was late and something felt different,” Roper shared in a February 2019 YouTube video, noting that the duo confirmed the news with a pregnancy test and made plans to move in together before losing the baby. “At the time, I didn’t really grieve because I just didn’t know really how to process it. It was so much so fast. In a really bad way, it was almost like this relief. It wasn’t really until after I had Emerson that I realized how much I love my child and how amazing of a miracle it is, and I think I really grieved that child much later.”
The pair tied the knot in January 2016 in Dana Point, California and welcomed daughter Emerson in 2017. In July 2020, Roper revealed she had suffered another loss due to a “chemical pregnancy” before welcoming son Brooks in 2019.
“I don’t talk about [either miscarriage] publicly very much, probably because I still always cry even though a lot of time has passed, and it always catches me off guard that there’s still so much more under the surface,” she wrote via her Instagram Story at the time.