Lily Allen Opens Up About the 'Incredibly Traumatic' Delivery of Her Stillborn Son George

LIly Allen 2018
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The singer lost her first child eight years ago and is still dealing with the grief.

Singer Lily Allen is opening up on the grief she continues to feel after the loss of her first child.

In an interview Thursday with BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, the British singer discussed her new memoir, My Thoughts Exactly, and reflected on the heartbreaking experience of delivering her stillborn son, George, in 2010.

"I went into early labor and they put a stitch in my cervix to try and stop that from developing, and that lasted for the best part of a week,” the 33-year-old said. 

“The stitch broke and I went into full-blown labor and the baby was really, really small,” she continued. “And as I was delivering him, the doctors said, ‘There was a pulse and now there no longer is.’ The cord was wrapped around his neck and he was just too small.”

Allen explained that processing the grief has been incredibly difficult, and the delivery left a lasting impact.

“The hardest thing about that was losing a child, but there were complications with the actual delivery,” Allen said. “He was so small he actually got stuck halfway in and halfway out, so to speak, during the delivery, and because his skin wasn’t fully formed they couldn’t [use] forceps [to] pull him out.”

She continued, “So there was a period of about 12 hours of lying there with him deceased in between my legs, which was incredibly [traumatic]. I went into trauma and I don’t think I’ll ever really recover from that.”

The "Hard Out Here" singer also suffered a miscarriage during her relationship with musician Ed Simons three years before losing her son, but has since welcomed two daughters five-year-old Marnie Rose, and six-year-old Ethel Mary with now ex-husband Sam Cooper.

Allen also revealed that she got pregnant "very quickly" after suffering her loss, and had another difficult birth with Ethel. 

“She actually was very ill for the first eight months of her life, and three months after she was born I then found out that I was pregnant with Marnie,” Allen said. “So babies became my focus in that period of time.”

Allen isn't the only star who has been open about her fertility struggles lately. Watch Carrie Underwood share how she dealt with several miscarriages in the video below.

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