'Teen Mom' Amber Portwood Reveals 2 Secret Pregnancies, Abortion in New Book
Amber Portwood has lived her life in front of the camera since she was 17-years-old. Fans were first introduced to her during Season 1 of 16 & Pregnant. The docuseries chronicled her teenage pregnancy and birth of her daughter, Leah. She'd go on to star in Teen Mom and Teen Mom OG alongside three other young mothers whose pregnancies were documented in the MTV reality series. Since then, viewers have watched her extreme highs and lows, including drug addition, an arrest and prison sentence for domestic battery, other relationship issues, and her struggle to put her life back in order. She's telling it all and then some in her new book, So, You're Crazy Too?, which also reveals her secret pregnancies in abortions.
Portwood writes that she became pregnant shortly after her breakup with Gary Shirley, the father of Leah. The two argued heavily and Portwood was arrested for hitting Shirley, all of which was caught on the show. After they split, she learned she was expecting. But taking into consideration who the father was, she opted to terminate the pregnancy.
"When my ex [Gary] and I had broken up for a while because the fighting was so bad, I was hanging out with a heroin addict and I accidentally got pregnant," Portwood writes, per The Ashley Roundup.
She too was an addict, struggling with opioid addiction. She knew bringing a child into the situation wouldn't be healthy.
"Not being able to handle something and having to terminate a life were worlds apart for me," she writes. "I finally had an abortion, however it was devastating to me. Again, I do not know why I made the decisions I made during this time in my life."
She'd discovered she was pregnant again after her December 2013 release from prison. The father was a guy she began dating shortly after her release. Unfortunately, the pregnancy ended in miscarriage.
"When I miscarried after falling pregnant by a boy I dated for a few months right after prison, it shook me, even though I had no business having a baby with anyone else at that time in my life," she writes. It's something she tried hard to forget.
"I wanted to bury it and mourn its loss but I couldn't get to it," she writes. "It was one of those moments in my life that I replay in my head over and over: me sobbing and trying to fish something out of a toilet for some inexplicable reason. I swear death just follows me around."
She became pregnant twice again: one resulted in a miscarriage. She eventually gave birth to a son James in 2018 with her ex-fiance, Andrew Glennon.
