Gemma Collins has penned an open letter to Meghan Markle about her own pregnancy loss, after the Duchess Of Sussex shared her recent experience of miscarriage.

Writing in the New York Times earlier this week, Meghan recalled: “After changing [Archie, her son’s] diaper, I felt a sharp cramp.

“I dropped to the floor with him in my arms, humming a lullaby to keep us both calm, the cheerful tune a stark contrast to my sense that something was not right.

“I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second.”

“Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few,” Meghan said later in the piece.

“In the pain of our loss, my husband and I discovered that in a room of 100 women, 10 to 20 of them will have suffered from miscarriage.”

The Duchess Of Sussex won a wave of support following her candid New York Times piece, which inspired Gemma Collins to share her own account of pregnancy loss in an article for The Sun.

Addressing Meghan directly, the reality star wrote: “Your sadness and grief leapt out of the page, along with your desire to comfort other women who have been through the same heartbreak.

“I am one of those women. Because like you I also had a miscarriage in July – one of the ten or twenty women in a room of a hundred that you wrote about who will know the particular pain of losing a longed-for baby.

“I’ve not talked about this before, but it was my third, each one a devastating loss on my longed-for journey to motherhood. I’ve been trying to have a baby for nearly a decade now, only to have my hopes dashed time and again by first one miscarriage, then another.”

Gemma explained that at the time she was unaware that she had been pregnant, only discovering this to be the case after days of severe cramps led her to call a doctor.

She said: “I was on my own at the time, like many of us in lockdown, and for days I just tried to push on until one day I broke down on the phone to my sister and she forced me to ring a doctor.

“The doctor sent me to hospital where they told me that I’d had a miscarriage. In a single instant, I learned that I’d been carrying a baby and lost it, meaning that once again I found my longstanding dreams of motherhood shattered into pieces.”

Gemma said at the time of her first two miscarriages she “drew a veil over” the experiences, noting: “No-one would ever have guessed that I was grieving, and even among close friends I didn’t talk about it much.”

“That’s why I think it’s really powerful that you’ve shared your experience.  It doesn’t matter if you’re in the public eye or married to a Prince, miscarriages don’t discriminate, and the pain is the same for us all,” she continued.

“I know my heart, like yours, will never repair from the loss of my babies, the sweet souls who never made it to earth.

“But I also know that this is not the end of my dreams of motherhood, or your dream of giving Archie a baby brother or sister.”

The former The Only Way Is Essex personality ended the piece by insisting she “won’t give up” on her dream of becoming a mother, sharing her hopes to raise a family “a world away from the world of ‘GC’, the larger-than-life character that most of the public know”.

“Thank you again for your brave honest words,” she wrote.

“It meant a lot to me to read them and I know it will mean a lot to all the other women who are members of a club no-one would ever want to join.”

Read Gemma Collins’ full article on The Sun’s website.

Useful websites and helplines:

• Sands works to support anyone affected by the death of a baby.
• Tommy’s fund research into miscarriage, stillbirth and premature birth, and provide pregnancy health information to parents.
• Saying Goodbye offers support for anyone who has suffered the loss of a baby during pregnancy, at birth or in infancy.