'I was planning the nursery...' North East singer Perrie Edwards opens up on pain of two miscarriages
Former Little Mix singer Perrie Edwards has revealed for the first time she had two miscarriages, describing the most recent as the “worst day of my life”.
The singer is best known as a member of the pop group which won The X Factor in 2011 and topped the charts with Black Magic, Shout Out To My Ex and Wings. Speaking on the We Need To Talk podcast with Paul C Brunson, 32-year-old Edwards said her first miscarriage before the birth of her son Axel in 2021, occurred very early in the pregnancy.
“I remember finding out I was pregnant. Obviously, I started bleeding not long after, and I went to hospital and I had the scan and they were like, ‘There’s no baby.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve made this up. Maybe I got a false positive or something’. I remember being on my own at the appointments.”
She went on to describe Axel – her son with fiance Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, a former England footballer – as her “rainbow baby”, a term for a child born after pregnancy loss. Less than a year after Axel’s birth, Edwards became pregnant again.
“I was rehearsing for the last Little Mix tour, and I thought, ‘I don’t feel good’. Every symptom under the sun. I was like, ‘I think I’m pregnant,'” she said. But by 24 weeks, after Edwards had started planning the nursery, doctors told the couple the baby had no heartbeat, in what the singer said was the ‘worst day of my life’.
She said: “It’s weird, because the first time it happened, I think because it was so early, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s hard’. But I think when you’re 24 weeks and you’ve planned out that room and all these things, it’s really hard. And nobody knows other than immediate friends and family.”
Edwards, from South Shields in Tyneside, has been with former Liverpool and Arsenal midfielder Oxlade-Chamberlain since 2017 and they became engaged in 2022, the same year Little Mix went on hiatus and around the time Edwards suffered her second miscarriage.