baby

'I'll never recover from it'. Lily Allen has opened up about her stillborn son George.

 

This article deals with an account of stillbirth that could be triggering for some readers.

Weeks after giving birth to her stillborn son George, Lily Allen walked out into torrential rain, lay on the ground and howled.

Nearly eight years on, in an interview for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, the 33-year-old opened up about the traumatic delivery of her stillborn son George in late 2010.

“I went into early labour and they put a stitch in my cervix to try and stop that from developing, and that lasted for the best part of a week,” she said.

“The stitch broke and I went into full-blown labour and the baby was really, really small,” she recalled. “And as I was delivering him, the doctors said, ‘There was a pulse and now there no longer is.’ The cord was wrapped around his neck and he was just too small.”

Allen had also suffered a miscarriage almost three years previously during her relationship with musician Ed Simons. She has daughters Marnie Rose, 5, and Ethel Mary, 6, with her now-ex-husband Sam Cooper.

She said the hardest part was losing a child, but she also had to suffer through a heartbreaking, traumatic delivery process.

“He was so small he actually got stuck halfway in and halfway out, so to speak, during the delivery, and because his skin wasn’t fully formed they couldn’t [use] forceps [to] pull him out.

ADVERTISEMENT

“So there was a period of about 12 hours of lying there with him deceased in between my legs, which was incredibly [traumatic],” she shared. “I went into trauma and I don’t think I’ll ever really recover from that.”

In another interview with The Guardian, Allen describes walking out of her house a few weeks later into “torrential, biblical rain”, to take off all her clothes, lie naked on the ground and howl.

“I don’t even know where that came from, I just found myself there – outside,” she said. “Despair. It was horrendous.”

Allen has been opening up lately to promote her new book My Thoughts Exactly, released today.

In it, she also discusses cheating on her ex-husband with female escorts, sleeping with Liam Gallagher while he was married, the intervention for her by Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin and her sexual assault by an unnamed industry executive.

If this article has raised any issues for you or if you would like to speak with someone, please contact the SANDS Australia 24 hour support line on 1300 072 637.