In a Thursday interview for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, the British singer opened up about her new memoir My Thoughts Exactly and recalled the heartbreaking experience of delivering her stillborn son George in 2010.
“I went into early labor and they put a stitch in my cervix to try and stop that from developing, and that lasted for the best part of a week,” said Allen, 33, who also suffered a miscarriage almost three years previously during her relationship with musician Ed Simons but has since welcomed daughters Marnie Rose, 5½, and Ethel Mary, 6½, with now-ex-husband Sam Cooper.
“The stitch broke and I went into full-blown labor and the baby was really, really small,” she recalled. “And as I was delivering him, the doctors said, ‘There was a pulse and now there no longer is.’ The cord was wrapped around his neck and he was just too small.”
“I don’t think I did — I don’t think I ever will, really,” the “Hard Out Here” singer replied when asked of how she began her recovery process.
“The hardest thing about that was losing a child, but there were complications with the actual delivery,” Allen said, explaining, “He was so small he actually got stuck halfway in and halfway out, so to speak, during the delivery, and because his skin wasn’t fully formed they couldn’t [use] forceps [to] pull him out.”
“So there was a period of about 12 hours of lying there with him deceased in between my legs, which was incredibly [traumatic],” she shared. “I went into trauma and I don’t think I’ll ever really recover from that.”
The star got pregnant “very quickly” after the loss with her older daughter, but the family was once again plagued with hardship after Ethel’s birth.
“She actually was very ill for the first eight months of her life, and three months after she was born I then found out that I was pregnant with Marnie,” Allen revealed. “So babies became my focus in that period of time.”
My Thoughts Exactly is available for purchase now on amazon.com.
This article originally appeared on PEOPLE