Nicole Shanahan, who ran as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate last year, opened up about miscarrying a baby on the campaign trail, a harrowing experience that nearly took her life and led her to baptism.
Shanahan, a tech lawyer, philanthropist, and mother, shared details of the deeply personal experience during Monday’s episode of Allie Beth Stuckey’s “Relatable” podcast.
“Part of my journey to my baptism was really challenging and painful,” she told Stuckey. “I had always believed in God since I was a little girl, but my relationship with God evolved at a rate that I think only a U.S. presidential campaign can evolve in. You are getting put through the fire. Everyone is looking at everything you do all the time.”
“I needed to pray, and I needed to listen. I needed to hear God’s voice. I needed guidance,” she said.
“Something happened to me last September which I haven’t really started to talk about, but I’ll share with you,” Shanahan said.
Shanahan said she suffered a miscarriage at 20 weeks pregnant in September on her 39th birthday, just as campaign season was winding down.
JUST IN: Nicole Shanahan says she almost lost her life during the campaign, says she had a miscarriage at 20 weeks.
Shanahan says she lost 4 liters of blood.
“I almost lost my life… I lost over four liters of blood. You only have four liters of blood, so I lost pretty much… pic.twitter.com/VIIAkgQ3tt
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 24, 2025
“I got pregnant on the campaign trail unexpectedly,” she said. “I wanted to go out there for mothers, so I really wanted to keep doing more even though my body was kind of like, you’ve got to slow down.”
“It was pretty far along, and it was really scary. I almost lost my life,” she said.
Shanahan said she lost an astonishing four liters of blood and needed a blood transfusion and surgery.
“I was dying, and was losing a baby. It was a very scary experience, but at the same time, I was taken so close to the end. You could feel it. I could feel it,” she said.
“Like you could feel your life slipping from you?” Stuckey asked.
“Yeah. I had lost so much blood, and I wanted to save the baby, so I waited to do the surgery,” Shanahan responded.
“There was this moment where I actually had peace with this idea of going,” she said. “And the chaplain came in, and you know, you just don’t know if you’re going to come out of surgery. It was a moment of, I want to live, I’m going to fight. I’m going to fight cause I want to come back for my daughter, my six-year-old, and I know she needs me, and God, if you want to bring me back, I’m going to give it my all. And I came back. I woke up, and I couldn’t believe it.”
“So many strange things happened around that time,” she told Stuckey about being on the campaign trail. “I saw some things that in the strictly materialistic world don’t make sense, in the spiritual world, well-defined.”
The day before President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Shanahan got baptized instead of traveling to Washington, D.C., for the event.
“All of the glitz and glamour of it, my old self would have been very drawn to it,” she said.
She decided to share her testimony about her baptism because “I know that people are very spiritually lost right now.”
Shanahan grew up in Oakland, California, and said some of her progressive friends might not understand what she is doing with her life right now.
“They’re just like, is Nicole now like a right-wing Christian nationalist, cause that’s how progressives would explain such a thing,” she said. “But I’m not, I’m actually exactly who I’ve always been with new life lessons.”
“We don’t know what God’s plans are for us, but after that experience, I hear the intention of what God hopes for how I spend my time, and I’m more sensitive to that, and I want to do a good job with it as I always have, but there’s more guidance than there was once,” she said.
“There’s so much pain, but to know that you’re not alone, that Jesus’ blood was shed for us humans in this world of pure discord so that we know our souls belong to him,” Shanahan said. “God loves us so deeply, that even in our moment of pain and death, we actually can know 100% without any doubt, that we are in God’s kingdom as we live and breathe and as we retire our bodies.”
“When there is temptation in front of me, I don’t have to be scared. If there is a situation of doing right, or kind of right or shadowy right … I will do the right thing because God loves me,” she said.
Shanahan was previously married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin and founded the Bia-Echo Foundation.
