Amanda Knox has revealed that she suffered a devastating and painful miscarriage while trying for her first baby with husband Christopher Robinson.
The 33-year-old, who was convicted and then acquitted of the 2007 murder of her former roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy, opened up about the heartbreaking loss in a new episode of her podcast, during which she recalled having to go through an agonizing induced birth after the miscarriage.
Speaking about her first-trimester miscarriage, Amanda recounted the heartbreaking moment that they learned their baby didn’t have a heartbeat – after doctors advised them at their eight-week scan to wait another week because the baby only appeared to be six-weeks developed.
However, when they returned a week later, they were given the devastating news that their unborn child had not grown any more, and there was no heartbeat to be found.
Heartbreak: Amanda Knox has revealed that she suffered a devastating first-term miscarriage during the pandemic, while opening up about the agonizing induction she had to undergo
Devastated: The 33-year-old (pictured at a conference in 2011) broke down in tears on the latest episode of her podcast as she recalled the moment she was told there was no heartbeat
”We went back a week later… and it hadn’t grown. It didn’t have a heartbeat,’ she recalled, before admitting that she was left dumbstruck by the news – in part because she hadn’t experienced any of what she believed to be the tell-tale signs of a miscarriage.
‘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.
Questions: Amanda, who was convicted and then acquitted of the 2007 murder of her former roommate Meredith Kercher, spent four years in jail in Italy and says she questioned if ‘something happened to her’ while she was there to caused fertility issues
”My body didn’t even know, and that felt weird to me that something that your body is so in tune with… it didn’t know? I didn’t know that you could have a missed miscarriage.
‘For all intents and purposes, I was pregnant with something that was just not growing.’
Amanda’s doctors explained that her body would likely ‘figure it out sooner or later’ but they advised that she go through an induction to push her body to expel the fetus, explaining that if she waited for it to happen naturally, she could be forced to undergo a D&C, which is a much more ‘invasive’ procedure.
However, the induction, which required Amanda to take two prescription pills, left her in horrific agony – which she said was unlike anything she had ever experienced before.
‘I went into the bathroom to take the pills and then I just kind of laid on the bed and waited for something to happen,’ she recalled, explaining that she didn’t initially take the pain medication that they prescribed because she wasn’t someone who usually struggled to deal with pain.
But within 30 minutes, Amanda was ‘shaking’ in pain, and she decided to take the pain pills in the hopes of getting some relief.
Together: Her husband, Christopher Robinson, joined her on the podcast, and recalled his upset at seeing his ‘usually tough’ wife ‘crumpled’ and ‘wracked with pain’ on their bed
‘I didn’t take the pain medication, I thought that was absolute last resort, probably not going to need [it],’ she recounted. ‘And it took about half an hour before I felt anything. But abdominal pain like I’ve not experienced before. I was shaking.
‘Eventually I was like, I can’t take this anymore, I need to take pain medication. I took some and then it was like another half an hour before that kicked in and I was able to stop shaking from pain.’
Christopher admitted he was horrified at seeing his ‘usually tough’ wife in such pain, explaining that he found her ‘crumpled’ and ‘wracked with pain’ in their bedroom.
Amanda went on to detail the upsetting experience that she had to go through for the next two days, revealing that she essentially had to ‘birth blood’ every time she went to the bathroom.
‘For like two days, I was birthing blood, wads of blood. Not like a period at all,’ she said, noting that she had ‘read stories’ about people who’d had to ‘go through the toilet’ to try and locate their embryo, which she was ‘grateful’ she didn’t have to do.
Still, her own miscarriage process was, she said, incredibly upsetting, particularly because she kept asking herself whether her baby was somewhere in the ‘clumps’ that she saw in the toilet.
‘I remember the biggest clump was about the size of a plum,’ Amanda revealed. ‘There were smaller clumps that came out. And every time I went to the bathroom to do that and I saw those clumps, I kept thinking, “Is that the baby? Where is it in all of this?”‘
After going through her miscarriage, Amanda says she began questioning whether she was to blame for it in any way – admitting that she even wondered whether ‘something [had] happened to her while she was over in Italy’ that might have caused fertility issues.
‘I did feel incredibly disappointed that was the story of my first ever pregnancy,’ she said, adding: ‘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.
‘Why? Do I have bad eggs and I 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 could be the problem. And it’s frustrating how little information you have at any point in the process.’
Amanda spent four years in an Italian prison after she was convicted of the November 2007 murder of her former roommate, British student Meredith Kercher, while they were living together with two other women in a shared house in the small town of Perugia.