Amanda Knox has opened up about her heartbreak at suffering a “missed miscarriage” that required her to induce the loss of the baby.
As part of her new mini podcast series on infertility, Knox spoke about the death of her unborn child and the experience of her miscarriage, tweeting the episode and explaining she was “baring her soul” about the experience.
The Labyrinths podcaster, who has been married to musician Christopher Robinson since 2018, explained that the pair had been trying for a baby when they realised it was more difficult than expected.
“It’s something you likely don’t think much about until you start trying to conceive. Like a lot of people, we were naive. We thought it was a straight line from unprotected sex to baby.”
“We were wrong. Painfully wrong,” Christopher added.
Saying they got pregnant very fast, the pair immediately started preparing the baby room as they waited for their first ultrasound.
Unfortunately, when they went in for their eight-week check up, the doctors were unable to find a heartbeat, with the fetus only measuring the typical size of a six-week old.
Coming back a week later, they were told they had sadly lost the baby weeks before in what’s referred to as a “missed miscarriage”.
“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?” Amanda said.
“My body didn’t even know, and that felt weird to me. That something that your body was so in tune with, it didn’t know. I didn’t know you could have a missed miscarriage.”
“The fact that your miscarriage can have so many different forms, I just figured that a miscarriage just kind of happens. You would start bleeding - and I wasn’t bleeding.
"For all intents and purposes I was pregnant with something that was just not growing.”
She was then given medication that sped up the body’s reaction to the miscarriage to prevent any further illness.
Amanda then broke down in tears as she struggled to talk about the loss of her child and inducing the effects of a miscarriage.
“It took a half hour before I felt anything, but abdominal pain like I’ve not experienced before. I was shaking,” she said.
“You’re so usually tough, you don’t take ibuprofen even,” Christopher added. “So I’m used to seeing you kind of shirk things off, but you were crumpled. You were wracked with pain.”
"I thought ‘I know 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.
"Like, Why? Do I have bad eggs and I just never knew? Am I actually too old? Did something happen to me while I was over in Italy? If it’s not easy and you don’t know why, then anything can be the problem. And it’s frustrating how little information you have at any point in the process."
Amanda Knox first came to prominence in 2007, when she was arrested and convicted of the murder of Meredith Kercher.
British native Kercher and American-born Knox lived together while studying in Perugia, Italy, but Kercher was murdered just two months after her arrival.
Knox and her boyfriend of the time, Raffaele Sollecito, were both charged with the murder, largely due to their ‘odd behaviour’ such as kissing at the crime scene, and doing cartwheels while waiting for hours of interrogation.
Their convictions were subsequently overturned numerous times, allowing Knox to be released from jail, found guilty again, and then cleared again.
She has always maintained her innocence in the death of Kercher.
The Supreme Court of Italy finally cleared them both in 2015, and ever since Knox has worked closely with criminal justice charities to help others who were wrongfully convicted.
Rudy Guede was also subsequently charged in 2008.
Labyrinths is available on all podcast services.
