Morgan Goodwin is opening up about the loss of her twin sons with her husband, San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Marquise Goodwin.
In a candid chat with PEOPLE, the professional hurdler recalls the time immediately after she gave birth to the boys in late November at 19 weeks, four days gestation, before the couple said goodbye.
“Unfortunately, baby A was not breathing when he came out,” says Morgan, 25. “But he also came out arms first because he was already in my [birth] canal.”
“So the baby B came out. He was breathing still,” she recalls. “He was probably breathing for about 30 minutes before he passed away.”
Morgan tells PEOPLE the boys were born after her water broke prematurely, leading the doctors to perform a procedure to remove her previously implanted transabdominal cerclage so they could deliver the babies, who ultimately did not survive.
Want all the latest pregnancy and birth announcements, plus celebrity mom blogs? Click here to get those and more in the PEOPLE Parents newsletter.
Morgan now tells PEOPLE she “stayed with my boys all those days” she was in the hospital following the difficult experience, having to be monitored and administered antibiotics for three days after doctors observed a spike in her blood pressure and a fever.
“I would stay with them the whole time they were in my room. The whole time,” says the athlete. “I did let them go back to get dressed and take pictures and get measured and stuff and then [they] brought them back. But I had them the whole time when we were in the room.”
This is the third time Morgan and Marquise, 28, have experienced a pregnancy loss, after she miscarried following “a slip-up” in college and they lost their premature son in November 2017, at 19 weeks gestation.
After the couple decided to try starting a family in summer 2016, Morgan says it took a year for her to finally see a positive test — after undergoing procedures related to remedying issues with her cervix, as well as endometriosis and a polyp in her uterus.
“I think that it just brought us closer together,” she tells PEOPLE of herself and her husband during the time following the loss of their son in 2017. “I hear a lot of stories about women having pregnancy loss and then it ends up putting a gap in their relationship … the husband is resentful [because he thinks] you can’t even have our baby or something like that, but it never got to that point. He was always supportive.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(539x0:541x2)/IMG_0691-948fce44e09946a6bd9507d48c4649de.jpg)
“In my own head, I would make up scenarios, thinking, ‘Babe, are you mad at me because this happened?’ ” she shares. “And he was like, ‘No, baby, don’t you ever think that I’m ever mad at you that this happened. You can’t control it.’ We are very spiritual. We keep God first, so we resort to prayer.”
Morgan reveals to PEOPLE that she and her husband decided to share their story to potentially “help someone else” traveling along a similar difficult path.
“It’s something that [many] women experience but nobody talks about it. So you don’t talk about it,” she says. “When you experience a miscarriage or you experience pregnancy loss and you don’t see anybody talking about it, then you think that nobody else is going to do it. And you get to a point where it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to tell anybody that I had a miscarriage.’ “
” ‘Let’s not tell anybody that I had a miscarriage because I don’t want nobody to think that I’m fault. I don’t want nobody to think that my body can’t do what it’s supposed to do,’ ” she adds. “So I feel like it’s a good thing to let other women know that you’re not the only one that has lost babies.”
