The star opens up about her experience
Gemma Collins has revealed doctors told her to terminate her pregnancy after discovering the fetus was intersex.
The 43-year-old opened up about her pregnancy in her early 20s on her podcast All I Know About Me.
“I got pregnant and it was such a shock – it wasn't planned,” she said.
“I was like, 'Oh, I'm pregnant,' and he was like, he looked really funny. I just remember he wasn't there, he wasn't interested.”
She continued: “When I went to the doctor, they said to me, 'Something's not right.
“This only happens to me. Not only did the stockbroker boyfriend meet someone else, but he's gone… They said to me, 'Your child, from the looks of it, might be hermaphrodite.'”
While “hermaphroditism” is considered an outdated term, intersex is now widely used to describe people who have both male and female biological characteristics, including genitals, organs and chromosomes.
Collins continued: “As you can imagine, I had no idea what the word was and I had to look it up. I had never learned anything about hermaphrodites – didn't know what they were! Didn't know they existed!
“So it was a real shock. I remember coming out and they advised me: 'You need to terminate the pregnancy because the baby is not going to be normal.' “
She explained that she went ahead with the abortion, adding: “I was very sad that the baby was born, but that wasn't the case.”
A 2021 study by the University of Manchester estimated that as many as 1.1 million people in the UK, or about 1.7% of the global population, are intersex. According to The Independent , this makes intersex people as common as twins.
If you are affected by the issues in this article, you can get support through the NHS website.
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