Three months after sharing she was pregnant at 54 years old, “Boy Meets World” actress Trina McGee has revealed she experienced a miscarriage.
While on “The Tamron Hall Show” Monday morning, McGee, who is now 55, shared that she unexpectedly lost the pregnancy toward the end of her first trimester.
“We really don’t have any real reasons why. I was still so grateful to have the experience of being able to conceive at this age and at this time,” she told Hall, adding that she’s experienced “a lot of depression” since and that it’s “just kind of hard to get out of bed.”
“There’s so many things that comes when you really want a family and you want your family to be complete,” McGee continued. “There’s so many dreams that you have, and it was very hard to face the fact that that’s not going to happen at this point in the junction.”
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The actress had shared on Instagram in June that she was pregnant “at the tender age of 54.” She’s already mom to three kids — ages 26, 30 and 33 — but she has no children with her husband Marcello Thedford, whom she told Hall she’s been with for 16 years.
McGee shared on the talk show that she and Thedford decided about five years into their marriage that they wanted children and started to see a few doctors, adding that “no one said” she couldn’t conceive despite being older.
The actress said she and her husband then recently traveled to Belize, where Thedford’s aunt who is a holistic healer helped her get rid of stress and get “into her feminine energy.” She credits this and changing her diet with being able to conceive at the age she did, despite having what she called perimenopausal symptoms.
As for sharing her pregnancy early into it, McGee told Hall she was simply “so excited” and “so shocked” that she couldn’t wait. But after losing the pregnancy, she isn’t sure if she will go through the journey again.
“Part of me doesn’t ever want to go through this again,” she said. “The conclusion I came to is, we’ll just keep loving each other, if something happens that way, fine, but I don’t want to put another anxiety on myself. Sometimes it really is better to let go and let God.”
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McGee’s first recurring TV role was playing Angela Moore, the love interest to now 44-year-old Rider Strong’s Shawn Hunter, on “Boy Meets World” for its final three seasons, wrapping in 2000. She was six months pregnant while filming an episode that premiered in 1998.
Though her pregnancy at an older age made headlines, data released by the CDC in April shows birth rates among older women are rising among older women despite being down overall. From 2021 to 2022, the number of babies born to women 45 to 49 rose 12%, the first increase since 2016.
Reports say the increasing reasons for delaying pregnancy can be concerns about finances, prioritizing education or career or that women are waiting longer to find a partner. And for celebrities, some studies say it’s even more common to wait.
Research published in the Journal of Women’s Health in 2019 found the average age for a first-time pregnant celebrity was 33.8 compared to the then-average of 26.8 years. There are also studies that show women who live in bigger cities and/or on the coasts — such as in entertainment-heavy cities like Los Angeles and New York City — wait longer to have kids while those in rural areas have children younger.
