Leftover baby cells stay inside your body forever – even after a miscarriage

Trine Jensen-Burke

How amazing are our bodies?

Anyone who has suffered a miscarriage can tell you how utterly devastating it is to lose a baby – regardless of how early and late into the pregnancy this miscarriage happens.

To a mother, her baby is forever her baby, whether Earth-side or not.

Recently, singer Mylene Klass opened up to Anna Whitehouse on her Dirty Mother Pukka podcast on she found ‘peace’ after her four heartbreaking miscarriages – when she learned her lost baby’s DNA is forever in her body.

The former Hear’Say singer, 43, has previously spoken about how she had suffered four miscarriages before giving birth to her ‘rainbow baby’ son Apollo, two.

And last week Klass explained how a doctor’s words helped her with her grief during when they told her a baby ‘fixes whatever needs to be fixed in your body’.

Myleene told host Anna Whitehouse: ‘I’ll tell you something that’s quite magical. Your body holds the DNA. I didn’t know this.”

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She continues:

“So when you become pregnant, there are cells in your body…that’s how you know if you’re carrying a boy or a girl now because they do those newfangled tests. And your baby almost helps you when you fall pregnant.”

“I break this down to my children, it fixes whatever needs to be fixed in your body. That’s why you feel you can feel very strong in pregnancy.”

“It sends out all these little messages and helps with the organs, helps tweak whatever needs to be strengthened and that DNA is left behind. So if you’ve carried a boy, it’s in your DNA. They never leave you.”

Myleene’s words moved host Anna to tears, with the presenter responding: ‘That is I think probably one of the most beautiful things I have ever learned.”

Microchimerism

In a post to her Instagram later about the episode, Anne wrote:

“Please don’t read on unless you have someone to support you. It’s hard-hitting.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but after losing five babies over the last ten years, I needed to:

It is true. Your baby’s DNA stays with you with every pregnancy. “They never leave you” as @myleeneklass said on @dirtymotherpukka.

But I want the scientific facts cemented here:

The name for it is ‘microchimerism’. The most recent research was done at Leiden University Medical Centre: “We can confirm mothers almost always acquire foetal cells with every pregnancy.”

The bit that got me was this from Dr J Lee Nelson: “these cells become beating heart cells.”

Our babies are always in our hearts. I can’t stop crying thinking of the little lives that have been with me all this time.

I hope it gives you some of the peace and catharsis I have felt since learning this. I also hope women who have miscarried are told this by the medical profession instead of hearing ‘just wait for the inviable foetus to pass’.

It would have helped me to know this. It would have helped to know they never really left.”