Celebrity or not, late pregnancy loss is a very public bereavement

Whether a celebrity or not, late pregnancy loss is a very public bereavement as women are left bereft of both bump and baby. Sam Murphy, from the OU’s Faculty of Social Health Care, reflects following Amanda Holden’s sad news…


The news at the weekend that Amanda Holden had suffered a stillbirth was particularly poignant as she had only just announced that she was pregnant a few weeks ago. Press reports have suggested that she delayed this announcement until she was six months pregnant due to her miscarriage last year – she was unwilling to risk going through such a loss publicly.

Stillbirth is defined as pregnancy loss after 24 weeks’ gestation and, by its very nature, is a very public loss. Judging by the responses to the Daily Mail story, 808 at the last count, the actor and her husband have much public sympathy and this might, of course, be a comfort to them. One commentator was worried that they might think it was their own fault even though everybody would say they were not to blame.  Or would they? 

The comments on Amanda Holden’s loss give us the opportunity to have an insight into people’s ideas about mothers. Such ideas are what we might call normative, that is, they are expressing codes of behaviour that mothers should adhere to and ideas about who should be a mother. For example, several people commented on the actress’s age – she is 39 – and suggested that if you had a baby at this age you needed to understand that there were risks. Other bloggers expressed sympathy for the actress by saying how unfair it was that 12-year-olds and teenagers have babies. From this we might deduce that the ideal age is somewhere between the two – indeed, one person used his post to exhort women in their 20s and early 30s  to have their babies now rather than put their career first. 

And speaking of her career, another theme was work. Having had a miscarriage, one woman suggested that she should have rested throughout the pregnancy. While we are not privy to the medical advice that Ms Holden received, if every woman in the country rested in the pregnancy after a miscarriage then I would venture to suggest that Britain would grind to a halt. Moreover, while sympathetic, one reader put the pregnancy loss down to the wearing of Spanx, suggesting that you don’t know what damage they do and, therefore, by extension vanity was the real cause. Another suggested that the recent spate of celebrity pregnancy loss was due to the expectant mothers not having enough fat on them.

Ms Holden is not the first celebrity to receive such negative comments, in an article about Lily Allen’s loss one reader told her that she shouldn’t have been prancing around on stage but instead should have been doing ‘simple chores at home’. Such comments also say much about how some people perceive the role of women in society.

When it comes to the actress’s experience of loss, one commentator suggested that actually at seven months, with the bump only just showing, she won’t feel it as much as other women who lose a baby and that she “should soon be out and about again”.  Previous researchers have noted, however, that grief following loss in not necessarily about the length of pregnancy but the commitment the parents have to the unborn child. 

One interesting point to finish on is that both Amanda Holden and Lily Allen were criticised for ‘attention-seeking’. While researching parental experiences of stillbirth, many women recounted to me how utterly exposed they felt they had been by the loss – they would tell how people would stare at them and cross the road to avoid them – whether a celebrity or not, late pregnancy loss is a very public bereavement as women are left bereft of both bump and baby.