Rebecca Adlington has ‘a lot of anxiety’ about new pregnancy after miscarriages

Olympic gold medallist Rebecca Adlington has said there is “a lot of anxiety” surrounding her pregnancy after she experienced two miscarriages.

The retired swimming star, who has two children, announced she was pregnant last week in a post that said she and her husband Andy Parsons were “cautiously overjoyed”.

The BBC pundit, 36, had a miscarriage in August 2022, which required emergency surgery, and another one in October 2023 when it was discovered during a 20-week scan that there was “no heartbeat.”

She told the PA news agency: “My little boy is four now, so it’s been a bit of a journey over the past four years, having two miscarriages, trying to conceive, and then the worry … I kind of didn’t even almost think about once I did get pregnant and how I’d feel.

“I think you’re so focused on ‘oh we’d love another baby’. And then it was this whole emotion of happiness, but also a lot of anxiety, a lot of worry going, ‘is it going to be OK?’.

“And I will say we’ve had a tremendous, tremendous amount of support from family, friends, from the NHS.

“The healthcare that we’ve had is so different this time around.

“We cannot fault the care, and we’re just taking each day as it comes and just trying not to get too ahead of ourselves, just trying to rest, look after myself.

“I’m very much a lot older now, obviously, from last time as well, so just trying to manage it all in the best way that we can.”

The double Olympic gold medallist decided to share news of her pregnancy as she realised she “can’t really hide it any more”.

Adlington said: “We’ve been so open and honest about our journey, and if something were to ever happen with this little one, we would talk about it anyway.

“So why not have the support, have the help, have the understanding from people, and actually be open and honest about it?”

Reflecting on the changes to her body, Adlington said the hardest thing about pregnancy is that you “just have to trust the process”.

“The relationship with my body over my whole entire life has been so different”, she told PA.

“You’ve got your teenage years where everything’s developing, and being part of sport, your body shape is extremely different in sport.

“You’ve got these big shoulders and this powerful thing that (means) you look at your body very, very differently.

“And then you have children, and you see your whole body in this whole other light, going, ‘how has this human body created another human being?’.

“It’s mad when you think about it, going, ‘there’s just another human being in there’.

“And then you go through disappointment like miscarriages, and you go through that heartache where your body essentially lets you down, and that’s really hard to deal with as well, and you still look pregnant after the miscarriages, and that’s a whole thing to go through.

“And then you get to this stage where you go, ‘OK, why isn’t my body conceiving? There’s no rhyme or reason to why I can’t conceive. There’s nothing that medically, they’re telling me as to why.

“And again, that’s really hard to keep that relationship with your body positive when you’re not getting what you want from it, and every month you go, ‘why not?’ and you just don’t understand. So it’s a lot to process and deal with.”

Adlington has one son, Albie, with Parsons, whom she married in 2021 and a daughter, Summer, born during her marriage to Harry Needs.

She announced her pregnancy in an Instagram post on September 23 and said: “It has been an emotional and physical rollercoaster navigating these past 19 months of trying.”

Adlington is currently promoting Hyundai’s Rest Drives initiative which is offering 24-hour test drives of the Kona Electric so families can use the car for real-life situations such as school pick-ups and drives with sleeping babies.