Amanda Knox is opening up about the devastating miscarriage she experienced in May.
On a new episode of her podcast “Labyrinths,” Knox revealed that she and her husband, Christopher Robinson, conceived quickly after they started trying and immediately began designing a nursery. The couple chose a name and shared the joyful news with their parents on Mother’s Day.
But at Knox’s six week ultrasound appointment, the technician was unable to find a heartbeat. Though the 34-year-old was told to return the following week for a second scan, she said she “knew something was wrong.”
At the follow-up appointment, it was determined that Knox’s unborn baby had stopped growing.
“That was confusing to me, because I thought, ‘Why would there be a dead baby just hanging out in there? If it wasn’t viable, why wasn’t it going away?’ My body didn’t even know, and that felt weird to me… I didn’t know that you could have a missed miscarriage.”
Knox’s medical team recommended that she take misoprostol, a drug that is often used to treat miscarriage as an alternative to a surgical intervention known as a D&C.
Excruciating cramping was followed by two days of “birthing blood, wads of blood, not like a period at all,” Knox said. She began to grieve all the dreams she had for her firstborn.
“I did feel incredibly disappointed that that was the first story of my first-ever pregnancy…. I thought, like, I knew exactly what I want to do with my first pregnancy, and to have it not come to fruition not through choice felt like a betrayal,” Knox explained.
Knox, like many women who experience a miscarriage, blamed herself. It’s important to note that 1 in 4, or 25%, of pregnancies end in miscarriage. The most common reason is chromosomal abnormalities in the embryo, according to the Mayo Clinic. That means it's no one's fault.
“Do I have bad eggs and I just never knew? Am I too old? Did something happen to me while I was over in Italy?’” Knox recalled wondering. “If it’s not easy and you don’t know why, then anything could be the problem. It’s frustrating how little information you have at any point in the process.”
Knox was famously convicted, and then acquitted, of her roommate Meredith Kercher’s 2007 murder as a student in Italy.
Knox served four years of a 26-year sentence at Capanne Prison near Perugia, Italy, for the murder of Kercher before her conviction was overturned in 2015. She's since written a memoir, "Waiting to Be Heard."
Knox and Robinson are trying again, but it feels different this time.
“It’s not a fun thing, which it was before. It was fun making the baby room, and it was fun to f--- like bunny rabbits,” she said.
Knox “sat with the miscarriage for a while, trying and failing to be OK,” but has since found comfort in talking to other women who have experienced the complicated grief of pregnancy loss.
"I don't know who that baby was. I don't know if I'll ever know," she shared. "It's a weird thought."
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