Little Mix star Perrie Edwards has spoken for the first time about the trauma of losing a baby at 24 weeks. The singer, 32, said she became pregnant less than a year after the birth of her first son, Axel, in August 2021. But after the pregnancy passed the five-month mark, a scan revealed the baby’s heart had stopped beating, which was the “worst day of my life”. Edwards described the scan as “an out of body experience” and said she was unable to process the doctor’s words. The news only sunk in when her fiancé, former Liverpool footballer Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, “put his hand on my leg and went, ‘Oh no'”. Although the experience was “traumatising”, Edwards said she had taken comfort from fellow musician Myleene Klass, who was recently awarded an MBE for her work to increase miscarriage awareness. Klass once said that when you go through a miscarriage, “the baby stays with you”. Edwards also revealed that Axel, who turns four this week, was a “rainbow baby” – a term used to describe a baby born to a mother who has previously lost a child due to miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death. She explained: “I had a miscarriage very early on with my first ever pregnancy. I remember finding out I was pregnant [but] I started bleeding not long after, and I went to hospital and I had the scan and they were like, ‘There’s no baby.'” Edwards said the loss hadn’t affected her as badly as her second miscarriage. “I think because it was so early, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s sad.'” The singer’s experiences are sadly not unique. In the UK, one in five pregnancies end in miscarriage and there are around 2,000 terminations following a pre-natal screening each year. Edwards joined Little Mix when the band were formed during the eighth series of The X Factor, and the group went on to sell 75 million records worldwide. Over the next 11 years, they became the third-biggest girl band of all time and the first to spend more than 100 weeks inside the UK top 10. In 2021, they became the first girl band to win best British group at the Brit Awards – but they went on hiatus shortly afterwards to “recharge” and work on solo projects. All four members – Edwards, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Jade Thirlwall and Jesy Nelson – have released music since then, to varying degrees of success. Elsewhere in the podcast, Edwards reflected on her romance with One Direction star Zayn Malik, which began while she was a contestant on The X Factor in 2011. The couple were engaged for a time, but the relationship fell apart in 2015 amid a flurry of press speculation, including allegations of Malik’s infidelity. “Definitely at the time, I thought everything we experienced in our relationship was normal. Because it was my first relationship, first love,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is how it’s supposed to feel. It’s supposed to feel a little bit toxic. In some ways, this is probably normal, right?'” Edwards said she didn’t think she could bear the pain of another toxic relationship, but now she’s thinking that her past relationship “probably wasn’t good”.
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