Penn Badgley’s Wife Domino Kirke Says She Helped Patient Give Birth Just Days After She Experienced Her Own Miscarriage

The couple has previously opened up about how the strain of undergoing two consecutive miscarriages almost caused them to break up

NEED TO KNOW

• Domino Kirke-Badgley revealed she supported a birth shortly after having her second miscarriage in the second trimester
• She shared how ignoring her grief impacted her health, relationships and ability to ask for help as a caregiver
• Penn Badgley previously said their losses strained their marriage, highlighting the isolation couples often feel after miscarriages

Penn Badgley’s wife Domino Kirke-Badgley is opening up about a difficult experience she went through after having a miscarriage.

Sharing her story on Instagram, Kirke-Badgley, who is a doula, explained that she helped someone give birth just a few days after she had a miscarriage.

“I had a miscarriage in my second trimester. After an awful D&C procedure, I went home to recover for a few days, plodded around on the piano, and wrote this song, ‘Mercy’ (watch the whole vid in the last slide), and went to support someone giving birth just a few days after that, still bleeding,” Kirke-Badgley, 42, wrote.

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Instead of calling someone for support, Kirke-Badgley said she decided to be a “super hero, who crawled around in the night, high on my own supply and the adrenaline of birth, saving mothers and babies no matter what.”

She explained that her choice put a strain on her health, friendships, relationship with her child and her husband, among other things.

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“Not even my own grief could stop me. Actually, back then, that’s why I behaved this way — I couldn’t be with my grief,” she continued. “It wasn’t til i was teaching a doula training many months later that I had to excuse myself and sob quietly in the bathroom for the first time since the procedure.”

“The role of a caregiver is too important. Your own grief and traumas will always follow you and come out sideways. It’s only a matter time,” the doula wrote at the end of her caption. “You deserve to do this work with a solid foundation of support and skills so that you can sustain yourself in it. Our clients deserve to be held by adults who have many tools in their basket, because the impact caregivers make on their clients is truly lifelong.”

On slides shared in her post, Kirke-Badgley said her “workaholism and people pleasing” hit an all-time low.” She also said that her “marriage was falling apart” at the time because she had experienced two miscarriages without processing her grief.

“I had no idea how to ask another doula to tap me out without feeling like a burden or a failure,” she wrote.

“I find this way of being in the caregiver role is all too common. If this is how you parent or were parented, then you have no shot as a professional caregiver if you don’t do the deeper work of examining your story,” she continued. “Burnout, at the very least, is coming for you.”

In November 2025, Badgley, 39, shared that he and his wife almost split up after experiencing two miscarriages in a row.

“This was our second loss together. A time when it did not feel as though the cycle would break. My wife and I neared separation as many do after losses like that,” he wrote in an essay in his book Crushmore. “Largely because we felt so isolated in a culture that doesn’t talk much about these things or know how to support those going through it.”

“Seeing our still baby in that tripped out black-and-white sono imagery is a dreadful memory I can’t shake every time we go for a sonogram now.”

Following their miscarriages, Badgley and Kirke-Badgley welcomed twin boys in summer 2025. The couple had their first child together, a boy, in 2020. Additionally, Kirke-Badgley has a son, Cassius, whom she shares with her ex, musician Morgan O’Kane.

“It’s funny because I wrote this before the twins were born, and now I feel like I am — and I mean this with love — but I feel like I’m drowning in children,” the You star said during a November 2025 appearance on the Totally Booked podcast. “So, it’s harder to get in touch with that feeling of loss because my cup truly runneth over.”

“But I mean, especially for us, me at that point not having any biological children and my wife having her firstborn … that was a real inflection point,” he continued. “One of the greatest of my life and my wife’s because we did near separation, and of course, we didn’t give into the gravity of that and the sort of entropy of that. And here we are with three biological children since.”

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