
This morning my friend Caroline Overington texted me from LA:
“Did you know Oprah named her baby? This is huge. Such an important step.”
I was just getting out of the shower and I got water all over my phone in my frantic rush to text her back:
“Wait, what baby?!?!?!”
Oprah had a baby? She adopted a baby? But isn’t she here in Australia? How did I miss this?

A reply from Caroline:
“The baby she lost when she was a teenager”
Ohhhhhh. I knew Oprah had been pregnant as a teenager. Vaguely. I knew she didn’t have a child now. Had she adopted it out? No. She’d been raped as a teenager, fallen pregnant at 14 and given birth to a son prematurely. He died in hospital within a couple of weeks and the whole traumatic experience had become her shameful secret until she spoke about it a few years ago.
Naming him was something even more recent.
At the first live event of her current Australian tour last night, Oprah told the audience of 15,000 people, “I did an interview with a reporter before I came to Australia and she said you should name the baby son who died.”
“So I have named him, I had a little boy named Canaan. I did have a son. And I named him Canaan because Canaan means new land, new life.”
That reporter was Caroline, who interviewed Oprah for the Womens Weekly just a couple of months ago and gave her that piece of life-changing advice.
Caroline was just the right person to deliver this message. Caroline’s daughter Katie was stillborn almost 20 years ago. I know Katie’s name because her mum has told me about her. An author of a dozen best-selling books, Caroline often dedicates them to Katie and I once commented to her how lovely that was. “I do it so people ask me, ‘Who is Katie’ and then I get to talk about her.”
Top Comments
My beautiful angels are Jo-Jo, Isobel and Noah. I also have Christmas ordainments for them that we hang each year. After Jo-Jo and Isobel were lost I went on to have a healthy birth with our daughter Aspen. I then miscarried late with Noah. I was blessed to have two more healthy children April and Adam. I have blogged about my loss before and have spoken at grief services, but I have never said their names to anyone other than sharing them with my husband and my children as April was very curious and wanted to know. I feel very emotionally writing their names right now and sharing them. A beautiful post and all the comments show just how many of us are united in this. Thank you
My perfect Patrick James, my first child, died with absolutely no explanation at 42 weeks during labour. All I was told was that I was "extremely unlucky".
I am so so so so happy that this is being discussed. Thank you Oprah and Mia. Oprah has been a hero of mine for many years and this just adds to her extraordinary strength, vulnerability and ability to bring about huge positive change to the world.