EastEnders' Kellie Bright announces third pregnancy in 'open and honest' post about IVF
"I believe it was meant to be"
EastEnders actress Kellie Bright and her husband Paul Stoker have announced they are expecting their third child together!
Kellie, who plays the role of Linda Carter on the BBC soap, announced her lovely news to OK! Magazine, revealing she underwent IVF with a frozen embryo.
Speaking to the publication about her previous struggles to conceive, 44-year-old Kellie said, "I want to be open and honest about this, because I think it's important for younger women to understand.
"It's important for women to know that, yes, you can have children in your forties and, yes, you can be lucky and do it naturally. But for a lot of us it doesn't work that way, so I wouldn't suggest leaving it late by choice."
Revealing she followed the same process as she did for her second child Freddy, Kellie added, "To set the scene, I really struggled getting pregnant with my second child. I was 34 when we naturally conceived Freddy but we couldn't get pregnant again. We tried for a long time and we got to a point, around the time I was doing Strictly, where we started to investigate IVF.
"I was 39 by this point and we went for it. It was successful. We managed to get four good, strong embryos. One became Gene, the other three went into the freezer."
Despite the first two embryos for her third child not working, Kellie's third attempt was successful, with the actress saying, "So this baby inside me now was the last one we had – the last chance of a pregnancy, because at 44 we were not going through IVF again. I believe it was meant to be."
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Kellie and her husband Peter welcomed their first child into the world through natural conception in December 2011, a boy called Freddy, before adding to their brood with Gene in November 2016.
Between the birth of their first two children, Kellie and Paul got married during an intimate ceremony in Cornwall in 2014.
Congratulations to Kellie and Paul on their lovely news! 👶
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