In an interview with The Guardian, Florence Welch, lead singer and songwriter of Florence + The Machine, spoke for the first time about the extrauterine pregnancy she experienced in the summer of 2023, an experience that led her to risk her life and profoundly influenced her music and her view of herself.
The trauma of extrauterine pregnancy
In 2023, at the age of 37, Florence Welch became pregnant for the first time. She and her partner had just decided to try to have a baby, not knowing that it would happen so soon. After a few days, however, something changed. Welch started bleeding, and doctors told her about a possible miscarriage. She was told it was a frequent occurrence, and so she tried to go on as if it was “just one of those things that happens.”
There was a concert scheduled in Cornwall, and she, true to stage discipline, decided to take the stage anyway and performed in the rain and wind, despite severe pain and bleeding.
However, a few hours later, back in London, the pain became unbearable. At the hospital, the diagnosis was different and more serious: it was not a miscarriage, but an
“I had a Coke can of blood in my abdomen,” she would later recount. Doctors performed emergency surgery, managing to save her life, but not her tuba.
The moment I was closest to giving life was also the moment I was closest to death. And I had the feeling of walking through a door, behind which there were only women screaming
The return to the stage and the difficulty of stopping
Ten days after her surgery, despite recovery and fatigue, Florence Welch is back on stage. Continuing to work so soon, she recounts, was instinctive and almost automatic. Throughout her career she has often pushed her body over the edge, performing even after fractures or illnesses, as if the stage were the only place where all the pain found a possible order. “With the body I have an otherworldly strength,” he confesses. “With emotions, however, I’m a mess.” The extrauterine pregnancy left her with deep marks, visible and invisible. After the operation, the need for silence became urgent: she was not looking for people, but for life.
I needed things that could not talk, but had life in them.
That was what healed me.
In his garden, among plants and animals, he found a way to stay in touch with something vital, without words or explanations.
From loss to creation
The experience inspired the new album Everybody Scream, due out on Halloween 2025, which Welch describes as “the fiercest, weirdest, most uncompromising” of his career.
The record deals with themes of witchcraft, anger and rebirth, interweaving autobiography and female mythology. It is a work in which death, vulnerability and the power of the female body are at the center.
I never knew my killer would be coming from within me.
In the song King, already released in 2022, he had sung “I never knew my killer would be coming from within” , a phrase that sounds like a premonition today. After surgery, he wrote on Instagram, “I wish the songs had been less accurate in their predictions.” Reflecting on that phrase, she says, “Having that line in King was disturbing because I had the extrauterine pregnancy … on stage.”
The experience of trauma and the search for meaning
For Florence Welch, turning pain into art was the only way to continue living. “I turn the real into the unreal to survive,” she says. “I’ve shared things with fans that I’ve never told even my closest friends: addiction, eating disorders, and now this experience.“
After her extrauterine pregnancy, she went through a long period of anger and disorientation: anger at herself, at her body, and at a work system that would not allow her to stop.
I was angry at how unsupported I felt. It is a system built to not accommodate women like me.
That rupture also opened a new research space for her: the archetype of the witch, the figure who embodies female knowledge, body and power together. She studied medieval and Renaissance texts at the Warburg Institute, following in the footsteps of those early healers and midwives accused of witchcraft. “Modern medicine saved my life,” she says, “But you cannot talk about birth without encountering magic, healing and death. Some of the first women tried as “witches” were midwives .”
For her, it was a way of reconnecting with herself where medicine had had to stop.
After survival: between fragility and toughness
Many think that such extreme experiences make one stronger or “enlightened.” Welch, however, states the opposite: survival does not bring lightness, but a new kind of awareness, more fragile and rougher at the same time.
I don’t feel lighter. I feel more fragile, more hurt. But it has also given me toughness in my work.
In a track from the new album, Music by Men, he sings, “Let meput out arecordand not have itruin my life” (“Let me put out a record and nothave itruin my life“). He explains that in the past, every time one of his albums came out, his personal life would disintegrate. “It was as if you couldn’t have it both ways. Or something would happen that would shatter everything else. This time I ask myself, why do I have this record if I couldn’t have a child? ”
Today she does not know whether she will try to get pregnant again: “After a GEU, the risk of recurrence is high, and IVF might be an option. But for now, I’m waiting. ”
The Extra-Uterine Pregnancy (GEU)
by Dr. Valentina Pontello – Gynecologist, Maternal-Fetal Medicine
https://www.medicinamaternofetale.it/medicina-materna/gravidanza-extrauterina
Extrauterine pregnancy occurs when the embryo implants outside the uterine cavity, in most cases in a fallopian tube.
It is a condition that requires early diagnosis and careful clinical attention, as the tube is not structured to accommodate and grow the embryo: if not recognized in time, it can rupture and cause potentially serious internal bleeding.
The most common warning signs are abdominal or pelvic pain, irregular bleeding, and a positive pregnancy test in the absence of a visible gestational chamber on ultrasonography.
When β-hCG values exceed 1000-1500 mUI/ml without observing intrauterine pregnancy, ectopic implantation should be ruled out.
Diagnosis is based on transvaginal ultrasound combined with monitoring of β-hCG values over time: in a physiological pregnancy the hormone doubles approximately every 48 hours, whereas in GEU the increase may be slower or irregular.
Treatment varies according to the clinical picture:
- watchful waiting, in very early and stable cases;
- Drug therapy with methotrexate to disrupt embryo growth at the ectopic site;
- surgical intervention, conservative if possible, or demolition in cases of tubal rupture or damage.
After an extrauterine pregnancy, in the vast majority of cases (about 85 %) the subsequent pregnancy will be intrauterine and physiological.
However, early monitoring in subsequent gestations and careful accompaniment, medical and emotional, is recommended to deal with the fear of recurrence and the experiences associated with loss.
