A British TV host recently shared the grief and guilt that wracked her for years after she aborted one unborn baby and then miscarried three others.
Nadia Sawalha, 53, who is a host on the talk show “Loose Women,” talked about her experiences recently on a podcast called “Dealing With the Heartbreak of Miscarriage” with her husband, Mark Adderley, The Sun reports.
Sawalha explained she had an abortion before she married Adderly, and her unborn baby’s death troubled her deeply, so much so that she wondered if her miscarriages were a “punishment” for taking her first child’s life.
“I had had a termination years before,” Sawalha said. “And I think, you know, all that guilt came up. And I was thinking: ‘Is this a punishment?’
“With each subsequent miscarriage, I felt like that. I felt it was a punishment. I immediately felt panic-stricken. What if I’m barren now and I can’t have a baby?” she continued.
With the grief of every miscarriage, she recognized the value of her unborn babies’ short lives.
When a woman miscarries an unborn baby, “it doesn’t really matter if you’ve known for a day or eight weeks, it doesn’t really make any difference,” Sawalha said. “You can see their face, you can see their smile, start planning where they will go to school.”
Sawalha said her first pregnancy with Mark ended in miscarriage. She lost two more unborn babies to miscarriage after their oldest daughter was born, according to the Daily Mail. The couple now has two living daughters.
The TV show host said her third miscarriage was the most difficult.
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“When I had my third miscarriage and I actually had it at home and delivered it, I was just not right in my head,” she said on the show.
Eventually, she said they buried the baby.
Sawalha said she encourages women to share their pregnancy news right away, as she did. She said the high risk of miscarriage during the first trimester should not make a difference.
“And that’s why I am such an advocate of telling everyone from the second you’re pregnant. If we’d kept it a secret for three months and then told everyone we wouldn’t have got that support in that grief,” Sawalha said.
