Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has shared her experience of miscarriage when she was 40.
The SNP leader revealed in a new book that she and her husband Peter Murrell lost a child in 2011 while she was campaigning to be deputy leader in the Scottish parliamentary election.
The book, which is about SNP leaders, reveals the agony the 46-year-old went through when she lost her baby in the early stages of pregnancy.
The First Minister went on to talk about how that event impacted her life and political career.
“If the miscarriage hadn’t happened, would I be sitting here as a first minister right now? It’s just an unanswerable question. I just don’t know.
“I’ve thought about it but I don’t know the answer. I’d like to think ‘yes’, because I could have shown that having a child wasn’t a barrier to all of this, but in truth I don’t know.”
Nicola went on to reveal that she wished she could have her time over in the hopes of having a family but not if that meant sacrificing all she has accomplished.
“Having a baby might have so fundamentally changed our lives that things would have taken a different path, but if somebody gave me the choice now to turn back the clock 20 years and say you can choose to start to think about this much earlier and have children, I’d take that.
“But if the price of that was not doing what I’ve gone on to do, I wouldn’t accept that, no.”
