Emily Atack has revealed she thought her ‘biggest fear’ had come true when she suffered a suspected miscarriage.
The actress, 34, welcomed her first child with scientist Alistair Garner, in June, a baby boy named Barney.
Yet she suffered a scare during pregnancy, revealing she lost blood and was later diagnosed as having suffered a hemorrhage.
Speaking to Jamie Laing on his Great Company podcast, Emily shared: ‘I saw blood in the toilet and I was like, oh my god, I’m miscarrying – it was just coming out of me and I thought that’s it, biggest fear realised, I’m having a miscarriage.’
Thankfully, Emily’s sister was with her at the time and rushed her to seek medical attention.
Emily Atack has revealed she thought her ‘biggest fear’ had come true when she suffered a suspected miscarriage (pictured in February)
The actress, 34, welcomed her first child with scientist Alistair Garner, in June, a baby boy named Barney
‘I had a scan and he [the doctor] said the baby’s fine, you’ve had a hemorrhage, a hematoma but the baby’s ok,’ Emily shared. ‘
‘I couldn’t believe it, I thought there’s no way – I thought it was all over and I thought having to tell everybody, you feel like you’re letting them all down, it’s really awful.
‘I don’t want to upset anyone who’s been through baby loss, miscarriage but it’s the most horrific thing ever.
‘And a lot of that pain comes from feeling like you’re going to have to let everybody down, because you’ve told them you’re going to have this baby and it’s going to be wonderful and then you’re having to take that away. The pressure is ridiculous.’
She went on to hit out at the general reaction, explaining: ‘the word miscarriage is so dismissed as this casual thing.
‘It’s so like “I know this girl who had a miscarriage…” because it’s technically seen as common. But what is so awful, I get really angry even when doctors say it in the early days of your pregnancy, they talk about miscarriage like it is such a common thing.
‘That it’s so flippant and so throwaway. But to that person who has just lost that baby it is the most devastating thing you could ever imagine. You have lost your child.
‘But for some reason there’s this really casual narrative, like it’s so common that it’s something you just sometimes have to go through. I can’t even imagine the agony and it’s just as women something that we are told to get on with.
‘Same with having a caesarean or complications with birth.’
Emily previously opened up about her childbirth experience, saying, ‘it was a very difficult birth and after 12 hours of labour, I ended up having an emergency caesarean, but he was so calm.’
Emily suffered a scare during pregnancy, revealing she lost blood and was later diagnosed as having suffered a hemorrhage
Elsewhere in the podcast, Emily up about her ‘uncomfortable’ sexual experiences, reflecting on drunken encounters that she views as rape.
The Inbetweeners star weighed in on the subject of consent as she revealed she’s fronting an ‘affirmative consent’ campaign, which seeks to change the law so that ‘the two parties that are involved in the sexual act have to confirm that they want to go ahead with it’.
She explained that she had been reflecting on past encounters that she now views in a different light because women are conditioned to ‘repress’ their feelings about sex and believe that having sex while too drunk to consent is ‘normal’.
Emily shared: ‘My situations have only been uncomfortable – yeah, literally. Honestly, I can only count on one hand probably where I’ve actually enjoyed sex.
‘Growing up, I’m sorry, as a teenager it was awful. There were no barriers, there were no boundaries. Boys didn’t know how to be with girls, girls didn’t know how to deal with those situations. It was a mess.’
Emily continued: ‘I went through life thinking if you wake up after a night out and something has happened but you don’t really remember it, you just have to suck it up and get on with it.
‘It’s like there’s no way anyone’s going to….it’s just not worth going down that road of ‘but I don’t remember, I don’t remember any of that’.
‘Yeah, awful, I’ve woken up so many times and been like “I definitely didn’t say yes to that’.’
The actress, who stars in the new Disney+ adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, added that men are ‘getting away’ with having sex with drunk women.
Emily also opened up about her ‘uncomfortable’ sexual experiences, reflecting on drunken encounters that she views as rape
Asked if any of her sexual experiences made her feel shameful, upset, or angry, she said: ‘Yeah, you do, but it’s been so repressed for so long, we were taught for such a long time that that was kind of a normal way to have sex – that you wake up after a party and go “Ooh, Jesus Christ, I don’t really remember that, anyway.” And then you just kind of carry on.
‘We’re taught that that was like normal.
‘The problem is now, now we’re all having the conversation more, people are coming out and going “Oh right, well, I was raped then.” And it’s very difficult to have to admit it to you.
‘But also the reason why it’s difficult as well for the men, men are getting angry because they’re scared, because so many men will listen to this sort of thing and go “I’ve done that before”.
‘There’ll be men that are getting their kids uniform ready for school and they will listen to something like this and stop in their tracks and go “Oh f**k, I’ve done that before.”
‘And they probably regret it and feel really terrible about it, but to be told now that that was wrong, and that actually that’s now seen as rape, that’s hard for people to digest because they know that they’ve done that somewhere in their lives a lot of people, loads of people.
‘That’s why it’s so difficult to go there.’
The Inbetweeners star, 34, weighed in on the subject of consent as she revealed she’s fronting an ‘affirmative consent’ campaign
Emily has fronted a campaign created by CPB London calling for a change in the laws on rape and sexual assault
The petition, which reached 10,000 signatures in five days, reads: ‘Current laws on rape and sexual assault allow “implied consent” and considers the perpetrator’s “reasonable beliefs”.
‘An affirmative consent model addresses these points by requiring explicit agreement at every stage of the interaction, preventing misunderstandings. The Sexual Offences Act is 20 years old.
‘We believe the consent model should be re-evaluated in light of international change and to better protect survivors in court, shifting focus from an absence of ‘no’ to the presence of ‘yes’.’
Emily, commenting on men sending obscene messages to women, said: ‘I didn’t ask for them, I don’t want them – but that doesn’t matter.
‘In fact, that’s the point. It got me thinking: Consent, or the lack of it is at the heart of so much sexual harassment and violence that women and girls experience, yet the current law still fails to protect those who don’t say the word ‘no’ outright. It’s time to make things simple – only a Yes should mean Yes.
‘That simple messaging would certainly help inspire more open and clearer communications.’
During a discussion on Jamie Laing’s (right) Great Company podcast she explained that she could count on one hand the times she’s enjoyed sex
The actress previously explored the alarming rise in online sexual harassment for new BBC2 documentary Emily Atack: Asking For It after experiencing repeated daily abuse across her Instagram and TikTok accounts.
If you have been affected by this story, you can seek advice at www.miscarriageassociation.org.uk or by calling 01924 200 799.
Anyone aged 16+ in England and Wales who has been affected by rape, child sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment or any other form of sexual violence can contact Rape Crisis.
Call 0808 500 2222 or visit their Support Line website to start an online chat.
