Nicola Sturgeon has spoken for the first time about having had a miscarriage at the age of 40.
Scotland’s first minister, who has been the subject of relentless questioning and speculation throughout her career about her childlessness, said she hoped her honesty “might challenge some of the assumptions and judgments that are still made about women – especially in politics – who don’t have children”.
She tweeted yesterday: “By allowing my own experience to be reported I hope, perhaps ironically, that I might contribute in a small way to a future climate in which these matters are respected as entirely personal – rather than pored over and speculated about as they are now.”
Sturgeon, 46, told author Mandy Rhodes that the loss of a child was not something she wanted to be defined by but that she was now prepared to discuss the circumstances because she did not want young girls who consider her a role model to conclude that she had deliberately sacrificed parenthood for success as a politician.
Interviewed by Rhodes for the book Scottish Leaders, serialised in the Sunday Times, Sturgeon said she hoped she would still have gone on to be first minister if she had children.
“If the miscarriage hadn’t happened, would I be sitting here as first minister right now? It’s an unanswerable question. I just don’t know. I’ve thought about it, but I don’t know the answer. I’d like to think yes, because I could have shown that having a child wasn’t a barrier to all of this, but in truth I don’t know.
“Having a baby might have so fundamentally changed our lives that things would have taken a different path, but if somebody gave me the choice now to turn back the clock 20 years and say you can choose to start to think about this much earlier and have children, I’d take that. But if the price of that was not doing what I’ve gone on to do, I wouldn’t accept that, no.”
The book describes how Sturgeon, who is married to the Scottish National party’s chief executive, Peter Murrell, was in the early stages of pregnancy and preparing to share her news with friends and family when she had a miscarriage.
She continued with a public engagement on January 3, 2011, an event to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Ibrox disaster, in which 66 Rangers football fans were crushed to death.
In response to the flood of good wishes she has received since the interview was published yesterday, Sturgeon also tweeted that while the decision to speak publicly about losing a child was not an easy decision she hoped her action would “help break ‘taboo’ of miscarriage”.
Last year, Sturgeon described as crass the cover of the New Statesman magazine that portrayed her and other female politicians who do not have children, including Theresa May and Angela Merkel, standing around a cot with a ballot box inside.
After the cover was released, she tweeted: “We appear to have woken up in 1965 this morning!”
Later, the SNP leader added that while the article contained good analysis, the front cover “reinforces the very prejudices she talks about”.