Perrie Edwards has been seen breaking down in tears as she recalled the devastating loss of her baby at 24 weeks pregnant, saying she and her partner, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, had named their son before his passing.
A Rainbow Baby After Loss
The singer, best known as a member of the pop group Little Mix, previously confirmed that her son Axel, four, with the former Arsenal midfielder, was the couple's 'rainbow baby', a term used for a successful pregnancy after loss. Perrie previously said her first miscarriage before the birth of her son Axel in 2021 occurred very early in the pregnancy and has now told how it left her feeling 'scared to get attached' when carrying Axel.
'I felt like I was scared to get attached, but then I was attached, and then it was almost scary,' she told Jamie Laing on the Great Company podcast. 'You can't help but get excited, and then the bigger you get and the more bump you get, and it's all becoming a bit real, and then you decorate the room and all these things and luckily my pregnancy with Axel was amazing.'
'I loved every second of being pregnant once I was past the 12 weeks and I felt like everything was fine, all the appointments were great, everything was going well. I thought, "Right, this is it." And I just basked in it. I loved every second of it.'
Tragedy Strikes Again
But tragedy struck when Perrie and Alex prepared to welcome a younger sibling for their son. On her pregnancy with Axel, the popstar said: 'That kind of got me feeling a bit more positive and I was like, "Right, I can do this. I've birthed a human. I've done it once. I can do it again."'
'And then we got pregnant again. And then we were about 24 weeks when we lost our baby, but we'd named him. And it was all this kind of again, I was attached. But because I'd just had Axel, I wasn't living in the headspace of, "Oh, something could happen". I was just like, "I've just done this, and I'm doing it again, and I love it!" So, I wasn't even thinking anything was going to go wrong until it went wrong.'
Perrie continued: 'That was traumatic because I feel like when you're that far along, and you have to have the procedure, it's just, I don't know. It's just different. No way to have a miscarriage is easy. If it happens at the beginning, it's not easier than happening further down the line. It's just not nice in general, is it?'
She then burst into tears as she said: 'And I think having to give birth to a child that you can't take home...' As Jamie showed her support, she added: 'It is sad. But we have his little ashes, and it's just like it's just life, isn't it? It's awful. And it does, it seems so unfair.'
Welcoming a Daughter
It was in January that Perrie and Alex welcomed their daughter, Alanis Valentine, into the world. Speaking about her loss and becoming pregnant again, she said on the podcast: 'There's not really anything you can say to make it easier. I don't think anything really necessarily helps. But I think for me, I'm in a position where I've been through it twice, but I've also got two children.'
'So, it's like I can't even imagine what it must be like for the women who go through what I went through and still don't have a baby. Do you know what I mean? And it took me a while to want to go again. I always knew I wanted more children than just one. I always knew I wanted Axel to have siblings, whether two or three or whatever. But I just didn't have it in me to get pregnant again.'
'I was just terrified. I thought it was probably best to just leave it. So that's why there's such a big gap now between like Axel and Alanis. It's not a huge gap, but it's not the gap I wanted, but it took me a lot to get over what happened to try again.'
She added: 'When I was pregnant with Alanis, I was just on edge the whole time. All I did was eat. I gained four and a half stone of comfort food. And every appointment I was just my like like stomach felt like it was doing somersaults and it's so scary.'
