Entertainment

Zara Tindall Revealed She Had A Second Miscarriage In A Moving New Interview

by Lauren Sharkey
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Pregnancy is a tough yet exciting time for any woman to go through. It can be a difficult enough for process for anyone, but being pregnant and famous must be particularly tough. Especially when a woman loses her baby and isn't able to grieve in private. In a candid interview with The Sunday Times, Zara Tindall's second miscarriage was revealed, showing just how difficult it is to raise a family in the limelight.

The Queen's granddaughter first suffered a miscarriage two years ago. The royal — who already has a four-year-old daughter called Mia with husband Mike Tindall — was expecting a second child in spring 2017 but sadly lost it in December 2016. Although Tindall gave birth to another daughter, Lena, in June, the royal has admitted that she went through a second miscarriage before falling pregnant.

"I had a miscarriage in 2016 and afterwards loads of people wrote to me and Mike to say they'd been through the same thing," she told The Sunday Times. "In our case, it was something that was really rare; it was nature saying, 'This one's not right.'" Tindall went on to say that the worst part was that "everyone knew", so it makes sense why the 37-year-old chose to keep her second miscarriage quiet until now.

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"I had to go through having the baby because it was so far along," Tindall said in the same interview. "I then had another miscarriage really early on. 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."

Tindall may not have a royal title but, as the BBC reports, she is a direct descendant of the Queen and therefore must announce any pregnancies publicly. This only serves to heighten the media coverage around her, making something like a miscarriage even more tough to handle.

Despite her royal status providing some downsides, Tindall has revealed that her close-knit family were the ones that helped her through, saying: "It was a time when my family came to the fore and I needed them."

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According to pregnancy organisation Tommy's, one in four pregnancies in the UK are likely to end in miscarrriage with three in every four miscarriages occurring in the first trimester. And the older a woman gets, the more likely she is to have a miscarriage. Recurring miscarriages are also pretty common. Tommy's classes this as when a woman experiences a miscarriage three or more times in a row, stating that around one in 100 women in the UK fall under this category.

Tindall may have two children but still doesn't describe herself as maternal, telling The Sunday Times that her brother, Peter Phillips, found it "quite strange" when she gave birth to her first child. "If someone had a new baby and said, 'Do you want to hold my baby?', I'd go, 'No thanks,' but I really enjoyed all of it when I had Mia. I shocked myself," she told the paper.

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In the same interview, she also spoke about her childhood spent at boarding school, her beginnings in horse riding which led to an Olympic medal-winning career, and how her brother, Peter Phillips, has always been protective of her. Showcasing her down-to-earth side, Tindall wrote: "Did I ever hook up with any of [Peter's] friends? No way."

With the fast-paced nature of today's world and the constant push for more information, it's sometimes easy to forget that famous people are real people with real lives and real emotions. Tindall's revelation is a stark reminder that anyone — no matter how famous they are — deserves privacy when it comes to family matters.