Miscarriage is a pain no one should ever have to suffer and The Queen’s granddaughter, Zara Tindall has just revealed that she has had to bear this pain twice.
In an interview for The Sunday Time’s Magazine’s Relative Values feature with her brother, Peter Phillips, the daughter of Princess Anne speaks out miscarriages.
After the birth of her first child with Mike Tindall, the couple announced that they suffered a miscarriage in December 2016. Now she opened up about another miscarriage “really early on”, between the first one and her pregnancy with Lena.
Zara said: “I think you need to go through a period where you don’t talk about it because it’s too raw.
“But, as with everything, time’s a great healer.”
Most women who deal with miscarriages can do so in the privacy of their own family. As Zara’s pregnancy had been announced to the public, the miscarriage had to be as well. An entirely different level of strength.
“We had to tell everyone and it’s like, everyone knows — that’s the hardest bit.
“That’s why I think a lot of people don’t talk about it because [a miscarriage] can happen early enough or it’s only your group of friends and your family that know.”
Many women blame the miscarriages on themselves, where they are out of the hands of the mother, and she is not to blame. Speaking out about her miscarriage will allow help other ladies feel less alone.
She continued: “In our case, it was something that was really rare, it was nature going ‘this one’s not right’, which your body does a lot, I think.”
Zara went into labour because she was so far along with the pregnancy.
“Amazingly, lots of people wrote to us and said they’d been through the same thing,” she added. “A lot of people do go through it and it happens, it really happens a lot. Because a lot of my friends had had kids before, I was always quite practical about it. It is hard and you are very lucky when you have a good pregnancy and everything works.”
Her second miscarriage was never announced to the public so the family could recover in private.
“I think a lot of the time you’re lucky if it happens a lot earlier.
“It’s something a lot of families are affected by but then, hopefully, a lot of the stories I’ve heard, they’ve gone on and had more children and they’re very lucky.”
Zara said that Mike was “very concerned and very supportive. It’s hard for the guys, it’s a different feeling of loss, isn’t it? That’s a time when your family comes to the fore, that’s when you need them.”
She is now at the point “where you can talk about it and want to talk about it,” adding “you definitely don’t want to talk about it . . . I think you need to go through a period where you don’t talk because you need to deal with it.”
“Because it’s so personal to each family and every case is different, you can never compare what’s happened or the feelings that people have gone through or the trauma. Every case is different, so I think it’s something that people don’t think you want to talk about.”
Zara’s aunt, The Countess of Wessex, had an ectopic pregnancy in 2001 and Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, had two known miscarriages in her lifetime.
