Kate Johnson has garnered a dedicated following on Instagram, where she regularly shares glimpses of her life as a mother of four. The 38-year-old influencer, who hails from Tampa, Florida, is known for her content under the username @nursekatejohnson, a tribute to her previous career as a registered nurse.
Her Instagram account is a vibrant mix of family snapshots featuring her children and husband, conservative YouTuber Benny Johnson, alongside posts about her fitness routines, culinary adventures, and wellness tips.
Recently, however, Kate’s social media presence has taken a more somber turn.
In February, Kate shared an uplifting video with her followers, announcing that she was expecting her fifth child. Following this joyous revelation, she posted heartwarming moments of sharing the news with her husband and reflections on the joys and challenges of parenting a large family.
Tragically, during a sonogram at ten weeks into her pregnancy later that month, Kate received devastating news: there was no heartbeat, and she had suffered a miscarriage, an experience that is every expectant parent’s worst nightmare.
Now, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Johnson has shared that heartache hoping that, in doing so, she might offer comfort to the millions of women who have suffered a similar loss.
She recalled: ‘Walking into your appointment and finding out that there’s no heartbeat is shocking. As a mom, you become instantly connected to your baby. As soon as you find out you’re pregnant, it’s all consuming, it’s all you think about.’
Johnson and her husband had decided to share the pregnancy earlier than they had with any previous ones, even consulting their pastor ahead of announcing it.
Johnson frequently shares dispatches from her life as a wife and mother of four in Tampa, Florida on her social media
Johnson (left) often posts about what it’s like to parent a large family
She felt that sharing her pregnancy so early could provide insight into the challenges of the first trimester for the many young mothers who make up her audience. Instead, in the wake of the miscarriage, while grieving privately, Johnson found herself faced with the pain of publicly sharing the news of her loss.
She did so with trepidation, yet she has found in the outpouring of support she received in response to her announcement, an unexpected balm to her grief.
She said: ‘It wasn’t intentional that it was public, I would have never chosen that. But it’s turned out to be a surprisingly good thing that it was public. I’ve had a lot of support that I wouldn’t have otherwise had. But it’s given a lot of opportunity for other women who’ve walked this and done it completely alone, privately, they’ve never told anybody.
‘It’s given them an opportunity to talk about it and to find healing in being able to talk about it. So, while I would have never chosen it, I’m ultimately thankful that it has gone this way.’
For Johnson, finding support and community with other women who had experienced early loss in a pregnancy was affirming, especially as she cycled through a slew of confusing emotions.
She said: ‘A shocking upside to this being public is that I’ve had just an overwhelming amount of support from friends, families, neighbors – people sending us dinner, people sending us flowers, sending us notes, sharing their experiences.’
Johnson, an outspoken figure in the MAHA movement, said that it was hard to realize that even though she lived and advocated for a healthy lifestyle, there were some things that were ultimately out of her control.
Johnson is an outspoken figure in the MAHA movement
Johnson (right), pictured here with Robert F Kennedy Jr (left)
She said: ‘My immediate thought was, “What did I do? What didn’t I do?” And then a lot of shame. In the space I work in, I talk a lot about health and about living as optimally as we can, a healthy lifestyle, and so to have to publicly say that I experienced this felt really shameful at first.
‘But life is up to God and so it’s not your fault. You don’t need to turn that anger or the loss into anger against yourself. You can release it to God and trust that he’s in control.’
As a result of this experience, Johnson realized that miscarriages were far more common than she realized. According to a 2023 report published in Reproductive Sciences, there are approximately 5 million pregnancies per year in the US and 1 million of them end in miscarriage. But despite this, Johnson said, much of the physical and emotional realities of what women experience go unspoken.
‘I don’t think a lot of people understand is that you have to go through [aspects of the] delivery of that baby and all that comes with that,’ Johnson said.
‘You have to go through the hormone shifts and the hard parts of postpartum without having all of the upsides of having your baby and that’s hard. I don’t know how somebody walks this without, one, hope in Jesus, and two, a strong partner, a strong husband by their side to be a steady hand.’
Johnson experienced a missed, or silent, miscarriage, which is when a baby has died in the womb, but has not been physically miscarried, so the mother doesn’t have the usual signs of pregnancy loss, such as bleeding or cramping.
In cases like Johnson’s, where pregnancy tissue doesn’t pass naturally, medical providers may prescribe medication like misoprostol or mifepristone or a form of surgery management like vacuum aspiration or a dilation and curettage (D&C), where tissue is physically removed from the uterus, to prevent infection or hemorrhaging.
‘You have to choose what is the best choice for you,’ Johnson said of her miscarriage management. ‘There’s a risk assessment involved with that for risk of bleeding and risk of infection. The timeline for me was that my body still was not recognizing the loss. It had been three weeks, so the risk of infection starts to go up. We decided to have a surgical procedure to mitigate that risk, because if you have an infection or you hemorrhage, the chances that you damage your ability to conceive again are much higher. So that was a choice.’
Of motherhood, Johnson (left) said: ‘As a mom, you become instantly connected to your baby’
Johnson had a D&C – a procedure that is legal in Florida for miscarriages but prohibited for women seeking to terminate pregnancies after six weeks.
She said: ‘I didn’t choose for my baby to not live. For me, this was a choice about making sure I was doing the best thing that I could do to be as healthy as possible for my four children and my husband, who are here. This was not about the baby at all. That decision was about me. People who choose to use a D&C to terminate a pregnancy and intentionally end the life of their baby…well, I pray for them.’
Johnson is staunch in her belief that life begins at conception.
She said: ‘In the Western medical space, we hear all these terms kind of get thrown around as if the life doesn’t matter until we hit that point of viability outside of the mother’s body, or until the baby is born, that it’s just a ‘clump of cells.’ But I’m just a clump of cells. Everybody’s just a clump of cells.
‘The spark of life is not contingent on how many cells you have. I cannot separate my Christian faith from my clinical background, so for me, this is a life. It’s a life from the moment of conception, and it is the loss of a life in our family. You are allowed to grieve this as a loss. You are allowed to feel all of the depth of that pain.’
As Johnson and her family move through the grief of losing their fifth child, they’ve found ways to honor and remember the baby they didn’t get to meet. Johnson’s two daughters had begun calling the unborn baby ‘Rosemary’ when she was pregnant and now, in memory of the child, the family has planted rosemary bushes in their yard.
For Johnson’s husband Benny, who sits by his wife’s side as she speaks, trying to make sense of this tragic loss has been impossible – an inconceivable sadness that has been paralleled only by the assassination of his friend and former colleague, Charlie Kirk.
Benny (far left) and Kate (middle left) were good friends with the late Charlie Kirk (middle right) and his wife Erika (far right)
He explained: ‘We had to deal with the loss of a dear friend of our family, Charlie Kirk, this year. We were very close with Charlie and Erika. And I will never, for the rest of my life, be able to explain it to you why that happened.
‘I don’t know. And I’ve decided to stop trying [to understand]. Because God is the author of life and death. Charlie was so connected with God. He was so spiritually in tune. And Charlie’s life was not mine. It wasn’t Donald Trump’s. Charlie didn’t belong to the Republican Party or Turning Point, he belonged to God, ultimately.
‘And so to fight that, or to be embittered over it, would be to be embittered against our creator, which is a losing battle.
‘Whether you’re going through a miscarriage, or whether you’re just a human being living on this earth you are going to suffer loss.’
Johnson hopes that by sharing her story, other women might feel a little less alone when they’re experiencing pregnancy losses of their own. And that they might be open to sharing their stories as well.
She said: ‘I think that more women should talk about this experience if they want to. There shouldn’t be a social stigma that it’s somehow gauche to talk about this. The amount of women that suffer through this in silence and shame and feel alone…I think it’s been very revealing for me just how much pain they’re carrying, because they never got the opportunity to even acknowledge that this life mattered to them.’
