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9th May 2024
02:33pm BST
Gemma Collins has revealed that doctors told her to terminate her pregnancy after they found out the foetus was intersex.
The 43-year-old opened up about the pregnancy which occurred when she was in her early 20s while on her podcast Everything I Know About Me.
“I got pregnant, which was a real shock – it wasn’t planned,” she said.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I’m pregnant,’ and he was like, he had this really funny look about him. I just remember him not being there, he wasn’t interested.”
She continued: “When I went to the doctor’s they said to me, ‘Something’s not right.
“It could only happen to me. Not only has the stockbroker boyfriend met someone else, and is already off... They said to me, ‘Your baby, could be, from looking at it, a hermaphrodite.’"
'Hermaphrodite' is considered an outdated term, with intersex now being widely used to describe people who have both male and female biological traits, including genitals, organs and chromosomes.
Collins went on: “You could imagine, I didn’t know what the word was, I had to look it up. I’d never been taught about hermaphrodites – didn’t know what they were! Didn’t know they existed!
“So that was a real shock. I can remember coming out, and they advised me: ‘You need to have a termination because this baby’s not gonna be right.’”
She explained that she went ahead with the abortion, adding: "It was very sad about the baby but it was just not meant to be."
A 2021 study from the University of Manchester estimated that up to 1.1 million people in the UK and around 1.7% of the global population are intersex. This makes being intersex roughly about as common as being a twin, via The Independent.
If you have been affected by the issues in this story, you can access support via the HSE Website.
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