The 2025 United States of America Pageants Mrs. Illinois is one of Lake County’s own, Libertyville resident Ashley Sebaaly, an advocate for federal legislation to require hospitals to provide maternal transfers after her own experience having her premature child taken without her to a separate hospital.
Sebaaly, who was crowned in November and will be competing at the national level later this year in Las Vegas, talked about deciding to enter the world of pageants, the challenges she faced becoming a mother and how those have shaped her advocacy work.
The mother of three runs Miracle Mamas, an organization she started in 2021, which provides hand-knit hats for neonatal intensive care unit babies. It also has an “angel gown” program, taking donated wedding gowns and making them into burial gowns for babies.
Sebaaly is well-acquainted with the difficult sides of motherhood. She said she lost her first baby more than a decade ago.
“Through that experience, I realized it was suffering in silence,” she said. “A lot of women have had miscarriages and even stillbirths, and it’s just something we don’t talk about.”
Miracle Mamas is a way to support and talk about those difficult topics, Sebaaly said, including through a podcast she started last year talking with other women about postpartum depression and other “serious health factors” that need more attention.
“Things that we usually don’t talk about,” she said. “Women need to get the resources and help they need so they don’t suffer in silence, which can cause long-term damage to themselves and their families.”
Sebaaly has faced other childbirth challenges. Her youngest child was born prematurely by more than five weeks with a collapsed lung, she said, and required a transfer to a hospital 40 miles away. She said the hospital denied her maternal transfer, since it had no legal obligations.
The experience inspired Sebaaly to draft the Keeping Mom and Baby Together Act, a federal bill she’s looking to find sponsorship for that would require hospitals to provide mothers with maternal transport from hospital to hospital so they can stay with their baby.
“I don’t want other women to go through that, because it’s really important to have that skin-to-skin contact and those first hours or days are really critical in the baby’s life,” she said.
Pageantry
Sebaaly is a relative newcomer to the pageantry world. She said she had never participated in pageants as a girl or teen. It wasn’t until the COVID pandemic she grew interested after seeing a post online talking about married women competing in pageants.
“I thought that’d be something fun to do,” she said. “Then through doing it, I realized it was something more than just putting on a gown and putting on a swimsuit.”
For the 2025 title, Sebaaly said she competed against a half-dozen other women in her division at the state level, facing women younger and with fewer children than her. She emphasized the importance of confidence and “having fun” during the pageants, something she said took time for her to understand.
The win was a big moment for her, Sebaaly said, and her family was thrilled to see her take the crown.
“I’ve been working at this for about four years,” she said. “This was my fourth pageant, and I’ve never placed.”
The win was also a surprise at the office, Sebaaly said. She works a 9-to-5 shift for a biopharmaceutical company, and her coworkers were shocked to learn about her hobby and new title. But they’ve been supportive as well, she said.
“I just felt confident and proud about myself, and people are really happy for me,” she said. “The office will be cheering for me at nationals.”
Since her crowning, Sebaaly said she’s been doing numerous community events around Lake County. She looks forward to the Las Vegas national competition, as is the entire family.
“We’ll see how it goes,” she said. “We’ve got three kids that we’re going to bring to Las Vegas to see it live. It’ll be fun for me; for my husband it might be a bit much.”
