Mark Zuckerberg is using his baby announcement to give families hope about miscarriage.
The Facebook founder announced that he and his wife Priscilla Chan are expecting a baby girl on his public page Friday. It came with a touching message about the difficulties that the pair encountered while trying to conceive.
Here's Zuckerberg's baby announcement:
In his post, Zuckerberg reflects on how common miscarriage actually is: "When we started talking to our friends, we realized how frequently this happened -- that many people we knew had similar issues and that nearly all had healthy children after all."
In fact, 20 per cent of all U.S. pregnancies are miscarried, meaning the fetuses are lost ahead of the 20th week.
A 2013 survey by New York's Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine also found that many people don't understand why miscarriage happens.
As many as 75 per cent of respondents thought a miscarriage could be caused by a stressful event, while 64 per cent thought it could happen due to lifting a large object.
"What's striking is the discrepancy between what people think, and what is medically known about miscarriage," Dr. Zev WIlliams, director of Montefiore's Program for Early and Recurrent Pregnancy Loss, said.
Zuckerberg and Chan, a doctor, were married in 2012. The pair met before Zuckerberg founded Facebook, while they were going to Harvard.
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