Associated Press
- On a new podcast episode with her husband, Amanda Knox revealed she suffered a miscarriage in May.
- She was thrilled to begin trying to conceive, and felt betrayed when there was no heartbeat.
- The process of inducing the pregnancy tissue to come out was emotionally and physically painful.
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Amanda Knox and her husband Chris Robinson suffered a miscarriage this spring, they revealed in a new heart-wrenching and detailed podcast episode.
Knox, now 34, said she assumed conceiving would be easy for her – "when I try things, I can do them" – and felt "betrayed" when she learned she'd lost the pregnancy.
The couple recounted, sometimes tearfully, what they went through in the episode, the first of a miniseries on infertility for their podcast "Labyrinths."
Knox and Robinson were 'nesting hard' before they found out they'd lost the pregnancy
When Knox went to Planned Parenthood to have her IUD removed, she was thrilled to be there for planning parenthood rather than birth control. But the device broke during the process, and she was sent to a specialist to have it fully removed. "Already, that was more hard than it should have been," she said.
Soon, however, a pregnancy test turned up positive. Knox and Robinson had already been recording memos to their unborn child and decorating a nursery. They broke the news to their parents on Mother's Day, even though it was ahead of their first ultrasound. "We were nesting hard," Knox said.
At the first ultrasound appointment, the technician didn't hear a heartbeat and told Knox to come back the next week. She may have miscalculated when she'd conceived, making the embryo too small to be detected. But Knox said she knew something was wrong.
Sure enough, at the next appointment she learned the embryo 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?'"
She said she didn't know you could "a missed miscarriage," or when a pregnancy loss doesn't have symptoms, like heavy bleeding, cramping, and passing the tissue in the toilet. It's unclear how many miscarriages, which affect 10 to 25% of reognized pregnancies, are "missed," since the medical community doesn't track them differently.
Inducing the miscarriage led to pain she'd never experienced before
Knox received three pills to induce the tissue to come out: one to ingest, one to put in her vagina, and one for pain. She didn't think she'd need the pain medication, but was wrong. "You were wracked with pain and crumpled," Robinson said, a state he'd never seen her in.
For two days straight, Knox said she bled "wads of blood."
"Every time I went to the bathroom ... I kept thinking, 'Is that the baby? Is that the baby?'" she said. "I felt incredibly disappointed that that was the story of my first ever pregnancy."
She and Robinson have been trying to get pregnant again, without success. This time, it's "work," she said, not fun, with everything from how she positions her hips during sex to what they eat and drink (not a drop of alcohol) regimented.
"Even if you obsessively grasp at every new chance at life, you remain haunted by the life that never was," Knox said. Hearing from others struggling with infertility on social media about how lonely they feel has been a source of comfort, and the impetus for more podcast episodes on the topic.
Knox was convicted of killing her roommate, Meredith Kercher, while studying abroad in Italy in 2007. After serving a four years of her 26-year sentence in Italy, she was aquitted in 2015. She's now the author of "Waiting to be Heard" and a public speaker. Robinson is a writer, and the two produce Labyrinths together.