It’s not quite often we see actors opening up about traumatic moments of their lives, but when they do, it comes with extreme courage and also probably the fear of adverse reactions. Recently, Zara Noor Abbas shared an agonising incident of her life – the birth of her stillborn baby – and how deeply it affected and traumatised her to the core.
While sharing a clip from her podcast with Frieha Altaf, the actress wrote about how harrowing the whole ordeal can be for women, and also shared a few words of advice for future mothers in the clip.
“It’s always a task to talk about what you have lost forever. But after so much discussion and a few months later, I could finally talk my heart out with my beautiful and compassionate friend, Frieha Altaf and share my experience of the healthcare system, the negligence, the aftermath of trauma, how women clap so little for themselves and don’t know how brave and strong they are when it comes to resilience,” she wrote in the caption.
“I hope I can gain some hope from women who have been through the same or maybe worse and together we can create awareness and have support groups for everyone to share their story,” she added.
Speaking of the incident, Zara recalled how there was hardly any support when she was going through it, apart from her family. “Looking at it now, it is a lot of support from the family, very less [from] friends, I think one or two, maybe four. It has to do a lot with my family. Asad, of course, because he was his child also,” she said.
“When you have a child together, it makes your bond extremely beautiful but when you lose a child together, it makes your bond extremely beautiful also. I think me and Asad have seen the worst now, we ask, ‘What else will we see? Okay, it’s God’s will.’ Everything for me and Asad ends at whatever God wills because whatever is His will is His will. Yes, there’s an extreme sense of loss and I think I’m still grieving,” she further added.
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Statistically speaking, mothers often go through periods of guilt following instances like such, which they shouldn’t have to. And similarly, Zara went through the same. “I thought maybe I didn’t eat right, maybe I didn’t make myself strong enough, maybe I should have lost more weight before conceiving, become thinner, maybe I should have had an intake of vitamins, maybe I should’ve taken folic acid,” she shared.
“But all of that is a ‘maybe’. God gives a child to even those who aren’t physically stable. He gives to those He wants to give to and takes from those He wants to take from,” she added, stressing upon how it is an act of God that nobody should doubt.
Nevertheless, she emphasised on how important taking care of one’s health is, especially during something as precious as pregnancy. “What I think women should know more about is that you can have a short cervix, you can have missing amniotic fluid in your system, you can have a weak uterus but all of these things you’ll never know before time. That is the beauty and payback of it,” she said.
“Until and unless a woman is pregnant, you cannot figure out these things. And when you’re pregnant, this is a huge miracle so try and take care of yourself mentally and physically as much as you can. Because as important as your physical being is, your mental being is much more important than that. And loss, I think, is a lifelong thing. I am a mother and he was my firstborn,” she added.
Most of the people who watched this clip truly admired Zara’s brave step towards opening up, and the courage it must have given other women to not feel guilty about it. Watch the full clip of Zara talking about in in detail below.
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