The pregnancy test Whitney Way Thore holds up for her best friend is a month old. “This is from October,” she says. “I was only pregnant, like, a few days. It was chemical.”
It is the first time the 42-year-old My Big Fat Fabulous Life star has ever seen a positive test. She had gone to her doctor’s office in early October for an IUI — intrauterine insemination with donor sperm — after years of trying: polycystic ovary syndrome, frozen eggs, donor sperm and at-home insemination — the road that led to the October test she kept secret.
The First Positive Test of Her Life
Whitney walks through what followed in a confessional. The positive test came first — for a woman who has spent years trying, that alone was enormous. Then, less than a week later, her period arrived and a second test came back negative. The pregnancy, she explains, was chemical: an early loss within the first five weeks, before a pregnancy can be seen on an ultrasound. Chemical pregnancies are extremely common, but common did not soften what it meant to her.
A Few Days, Then Silence
“Having a chemical pregnancy might not seem like a big deal to most people because it is so incredibly common,” she says. “But for me, someone who’s been trying to get pregnant for so long, it feels huge. I mean, it is basically a very early miscarriage.” She chooses her words carefully — she knows how easily a loss this early is dismissed, even by people who mean well.
Why She Told No One for a Month
For a month, she told no one at all. “I almost feel like some people would think, ‘Well, you didn’t lose anything. It wasn’t actually a baby,’” she says. “But you definitely do feel like you lost something.” That fear kept the test in a drawer and the story to herself, until Ashley Baynes — her closest friend — became the first to hear it, a month later.
The Night She Finally Told Ashley
The scene aired in the Season 14 premiere on Tuesday, November 10, a day after Us Weekly shared the clip. Ashley does not argue with the grief or grade it. “Hearing that Whitney went through this chemical pregnancy alone and didn’t tell anyone breaks my heart,” she says, calling the experience traumatic. It is the answer she had feared she would not get. Her engagement to Jake Beaudoin, who proposed in August, frames the season too: he supports her dream of becoming a mother, though the premiere showed the tension underneath, when he was asked whether Whitney could use another man’s sperm and answered, “Uh, I would prefer not.”
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The response since the premiere has mostly been the one she feared she would not get. Fans who have lived through the same loss have filled the comments with their own stories; some remembered her late mother, Babs. A small corner of Reddit has called the storyline tired; the louder chorus is simpler: you did lose something, and it counted. Whitney has also corrected the record: AI-generated images falsely showing her with a child have circulated, and she has made clear they are not real. The season still holds a second attempt at artificial insemination, and the altar she builds to manifest a baby. “I still want a baby, that’s my main objective,” she says in the trailer.
For now, the test from October stays what it was: a few days of hope, a loss carried alone for a month, and a story Whitney finally trusted her best friend — and millions of strangers — to hear. If you have carried a loss like this, what did you most need someone to say? And what would you say to Whitney now?
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