Gemma Collins has revealed she had a miscarriage in July, in an emotional open letter to Meghan Markle.
In a piece for The New York Times this week, the Duchess of Sussex bravely opened up about losing her second child with Prince Harry this July.
Moved by Meghan’s op-ed, Gemma penned an open letter to her, which was published by The Sun today.
Gemma wrote: “Dear Meghan, I hope you don’t mind me writing to you like this. You don’t know me, and we’ve never met, but I cried when I read what you’d written about your miscarriage yesterday.”
“Your sadness and grief leapt out of the page, along with your desire to comfort other women who have been through the same heartbreak.”
“I am one of those women. Because like you I also had a miscarriage in July – one of the ten or twenty women in a room of a hundred that you wrote about who will know the particular pain of losing a longed-for baby,” she continued.
“I’ve not talked about this before, but it was my third, each one a devastating loss on my longed-for journey to motherhood. I’ve been trying to have a baby for nearly a decade now, only to have my hopes dashed time and again by first one miscarriage, then another.”
Gemma wrote: “This last time my miscarriage started, just like yours, with sharp cramps which caught me by surprise one morning. Unlike you though, I didn’t know I was pregnant and dismissed them as the symptoms of a heavy period.”
“I was on my own at the time, like many of us in lockdown, and for days I just tried to push on until one day I broke down on the phone to my sister and she forced me to ring a doctor. The doctor sent me to hospital where they told me that I’d had a miscarriage.”
“In a single instant, I learned that I’d been carrying a baby and lost it, meaning that once again I found my longstanding dreams of motherhood shattered into pieces.”
She continued: “In your article you talk about the unbearable grief so many of us have felt but so few of us feel able to talk about.”
“After that terrible first miscarriage, I cried buckets of tears in private but in public I felt I had to put on a big Gemma Collins brave face. Aside from those close to me, no-one would ever have guessed that I was grieving, and even among close friends I didn’t talk about it much.”
“It was the same the second time. I drew a veil over it which I wouldn’t let anyone peek through. Now, looking back, I realise that it would have helped if I’d been more open, and allowed more people to ask if I was ok.”
“That’s why I think it’s really powerful that you’ve shared your experience. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the public eye or married to a Prince, miscarriages don’t discriminate, and the pain is the same for us all,” she wrote.
“I know my heart, like yours, will never repair from the loss of my babies, the sweet souls who never made it to earth. But I also know that this is not the end of my dreams of motherhood, or your dream of giving Archie a baby brother or sister.”
Gemma continued: “You and Harry have made a wonderful new life for yourselves across the ocean, and I feel sure that when the time is right Archie will be blessed with a new sibling.”
“I won’t give up hope either, even though it’s hard. Four months on from my last miscarriage, I still think about it every day. I’ve since broken up with James [Argent], the man who would have been the baby’s father, and it’s hard being single.”
“At the same time, I am trying to trust in Fate… and when my time to be a mother comes, I will do everything I can to protect the privacy of that cherished prize I have yearned for for so long.”
Gemma concluded her letter by writing: “Thank you again for your brave honest words. It meant a lot to me to read them and I know it will mean a lot to all the other women who are members of a club no-one would ever want to join.”
