Teen Mom OG star Catelynn Lowell is silencing speculation about the reason she and husband Tyler Baltierra chose to place their firstborn daughter, Carly, up for adoption.
“I wanted to set something straight. I’m seeing the comment a lot that people are saying Tyler gave me an ultimatum: either my baby or him,” Catelynn, 32, said in a Thursday, September 19, TikTok video. “That comment is absolutely disgusting on so many levels.”
She continued, “When you say something like that it strips me of all of my strength and sorrow that it took me as a birth mom to place my child [up for adoption.]”
Catelynn further denied that she would “give my baby away for a man,” adding that Tyler did not “force” her to make the decision.
“That is absolutely untrue,” she said. “To think that I would still be with said man after all these years if he did give me an ultimatum that it’s either my baby or him? That’s absolutely disgusting.”
Catelynn and Tyler, 32, were expecting their first baby together while they were in high school. Catelynn’s pregnancy was chronicled on the first season of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant, culminating in their decision to place daughter Carly up for adoption. (Carly, now 16, was adopted by Brandon and Theresa Davis and still has some visitations with Catelynn and Tyler.)
In her Thursday message, Catelynn reflected on the “strength,” “power” and “sorrow” she faced in making the decision.
“Not only [does this comment] strip me of all of my power that I had to use within my being to hand my child over to someone else, you’re also taking it away from Tyler,” Catelynn said. “Do you think he did not want to keep this child? Do you think he didn’t spend many nights crying just like I did? I don’t understand where people are getting this from.”
Catelynn pointed out that Tyler recently theorized in an episode of Teen Mom OG that they would have likely broken up had they raised Carly together.
“He’s not implying that if I didn’t place Carly, he’d break up with me,” she said. “What he’s implying is that teen parents typically do not stay together. … Teen parents go through stress and all the things to raise a baby. I agree with him. If we had kept Carly, we probably still wouldn’t be together and we still wouldn’t have had all these other children.”
Catelynn and Tyler got married in 2015, later welcoming daughters Nova, 9, Vaeda, 5, and Rya, 3. The pair’s youngest daughters’ have also started forming their own bonds with Carly.
“It just feels, like … really, really powerful. Like, I can like feel the energy when they’re all together,” Tyler exclusively told Us Weekly in August 2023. “It’s almost like time kind of slows down a little bit, and I’m just like, man, if I could just sit here forever and witness this, I’d be fine for the rest of my life.”
He added at the time, “This bond that you see, it’s far greater than just the DNA that they share. It’s like this … I don’t know. It’s very intense. It’s very powerful. Very inspirational. I’m very proud of it. And I wish we could just have more of those times.”
