The 42-year-old actress also detailed her “harrowing” experience with IVF, revealing that she once suffered an ectopic pregnancy.
Paloma Faith is opening up about her struggles with fertility.
During an appearance on the How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast, the Pennyworth star shared that she suffered a miscarriage while shooting a fight scene for the series, but didn’t tell anyone.
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“[The miscarriage] started at work and it was a fight scene on Pennyworth. I just thought to myself, ‘It’s gone so I might as well carry on with what I was doing,'” Faith recalled. “I had to go to the toilet nine times.”
“I told them I ate something bad last night because I knew if I told them, they would escort me home,” she added. “I didn’t want to. I would just be going home without work and without a viable pregnancy.”
The 42-year-old singer also detailed her difficult experience with in vitro fertilization (IVF).
“It’s so harrowing doing it and it’s always in the background. Nobody knows it’s happening. We had some issues,” Faith shared. “I knew quite quickly there were problems and then found out the beginning of our fertility treatment was because it was on his side there were those problems, but thanks to modern science and the patriarchy, it still falls on the woman.”
Faith revealed that she suffered an ectopic pregnancy, which “occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus,” usually in a fallopian tube, according to Mayo Clinic.
“I then had an ectopic pregnancy with the first one. Then my fertility starts going because I’ve had one tube damaged,” she explained. “The second time worked, so I was lucky because I actually ended up with two viable pregnancies quite quickly.”
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However, the actress — who shares two daughters with her ex Leyman Lahcine — said she experienced more hardships when she gave birth to her children.
“The birth was really difficult. It was actually unbearable,” said Faith, who welcomed her first daughter in 2016. “It started with PROMS (Premature Rupture of Membranes). You’re, sort of, in labor, and that was only at six months pregnant, I think, and they were like, ‘You’re going to have to induce, you’re going to have a premature baby.'”
“I was really defiant I was going to have that, so I was just in bed rest and downing four liters of water a day for a month to replenish the lost waters,” she continued, adding that her labor lasted 21 hours, and she only got “seven hours of sleep in seven days.”
Faith ultimately had an “emergency” C-section, which she said resulted in more complications.
“[It] caused me fertility problems as well, and then a bit of post-partum psychosis because of lack of sleep so I was, like, hallucinating,” she said. “Probably depressed for a couple of years without realizing.”
“Later, I wanted a second child and then I had three failed transfers,” she added. “The fourth one worked and I was just so, kind of, headstrong about it.”
Faith welcomed her second child in 2021. She confirmed last year that she and Leyman had called it quits after nearly 10 years together.
