Jessa Duggar Seewald tearfully shares that she had a miscarriage

Jessa Duggar Seewald revealed that she had a miscarriage while pregnant with her fifth child.

In a Feb. 24 video posted to the "19 Kids and Counting" and "Counting On" star's YouTube channel, Seewald took viewers inside her pregnancy journey with husband Ben Seewald and their children, Spurgeon, 7, Henry, 6, Ivy, 3, and Fern, 1.

She also had a miscarriage between the births of Ivy and Fern.

As Jessa Seewald explained in the video, toward the end of her first trimester in December 2022, she was feeling nausea, fatigue and food aversions, along with "the tiniest amount" of vaginal bleeding. A small amount of bleeding during pregnancy is often perfectly normal, but sometimes it can signal a miscarriage, according to the Mayo Clinic, which defines a miscarriage as a "spontaneous" loss before the 20th week of pregnancy.

She then had an ultrasound.

"As soon as she started taking a look at the baby, I could tell there was some concern in her voice," she explained. "She said, 'Well, the sac looks good; the baby does not."

"At that moment, I was just in complete shock," Seewald added. "I didn't even have words. I just immediately started crying."

"I feel like in some ways, missed miscarriages can be so much more jarring because you don't have clear signs of something going wrong," she said. "I had minimal spotting for like, 24 hours, and that was it."

A "missed" miscarriage is one in which the fetus dies (or never formed) in utero, according to the Mayo Clinic, but the pregnancy is not expelled from the body.

Seewald continued, "I ended up having to go see my doctor because (of) my history of hemorrhaging and all of that, there was concern that if I tried to just take something or pass the baby at home that, that I might have trouble and have to be transported and all that. It just wasn't something that seemed like a very good option. And so we decided to go to the hospital, get checked in there and go through the process of a D&C."

According to the Mayo Clinic, dilation and curettage (D&C) is the process of removing uterine tissue to either diagnose or treat uterine conditions or after a miscarriage or abortion.

Seewald clarified in a comment posted under her YouTube channel that her baby's heart had stopped beating three weeks before her D&C. She noted that she also had a D&C two weeks after the birth of Ivy, due to a retained placenta.

"I've definitely have had my share of questions for God ... why, why would you give us this baby for such a short time? Why?" she said in the video, adding, "Lord, why now after going through this — of course there (are) always the questions that go through your mind like, 'Was it my fault? What could I have done differently?'"

In the video, Seewald shared her pain over the miscarriage.

"Probably the most devastating moment was waking up after the procedure was over and just having this hollow feeling inside because you know that the life that was in you is no longer there," she said tearfully. "You never did get to see your baby or say those goodbyes."

Telling their children about the miscarriage was hard, she said.

"It's been a journey, and it's one that I am still on," said Seewald.

"Walking through loss, your heart goes out to moms who struggle with infertility or who have lost babies," she added. "It's very painful."

Seewald is the fifth-oldest of 19 children from the original “19 Kids and Counting” reality series, which followed the life of a very large family in Arkansas.

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This article was originally published on TODAY.com