Joy-Anna Duggar Forsyth has announced she is pregnant with her fourth child, due in 2027. The announcement came just hours after she shared details of her significant struggle with depression after experiencing a stillbirth in 2019.
Duggar, 28, posted the news on Instagram, sharing photos of herself and her husband, Austin Forsyth, 32, cradling her baby bump. "Coming 2027!" she wrote. "So much joy, so much excitement and so much love for this little one already. God knew we needed you."
The pregnancy announcement followed a candid discussion on her sister Jinger Duggar's podcast, where Joy-Anna opened up about the emotional aftermath of losing her daughter at 20 weeks gestation. She explained that the stillbirth led to a period of depression, which she described as a "really dark time."
"I felt like, at first, I was like, 'I’m going to be strong and I’m going to push through this.' But after the dust settled and a new normal had to start happening, it was really hard," Duggar recalled. "That's the first time that I went through a bout of depression. I didn’t know how to handle the immense pain and struggled to move forward."
She added that she worried about becoming a "bitter person" but eventually found that after about six months, "it started to lift a little bit." She expressed a sense of relief, stating, "I was feeling a little bit more just like, okay, we're going to get through this. We're going to be okay."
Duggar also touched upon the broader impact of family issues on her mental well-being. "There's definitely been really hard things in our lives," she said. "Just family stuff - we've had wave after wave of just sickening horrible things happening. It really just sends me into a spiral."
Joy-Anna and Austin Forsyth are already parents to sons Gideon, eight, and Gunner, three, and daughter Evelyn, six.
The Duggar family rose to prominence through the TLC reality series "19 Kids and Counting" and its spin-off "Counting On." These shows documented the lives of Joy-Anna and her 18 siblings, who were raised in accordance with the strict rules of the Christian group, The Institute in Basic Life Principles. The family has faced public scrutiny in recent years due to scandals involving other family members, including the arrest and legal proceedings against her brother Joseph Duggar and the child pornography conviction of her brother Josh Duggar.