Louise Thompson has shared a heart-wrenching yet hopeful update on her journey to expand her family, revealing she is “grieving” the fact she will never carry another child herself. The 35-year-old TV personality and personal trainer, alongside her partner Ryan Libbey, also 35, are embarking on a £50,000 surrogacy and IVF journey after a traumatic birth experience in 2021 left lasting physical and emotional scars.
Louise, who almost died while giving birth to her son Leo via emergency caesarean, has since battled post-natal PTSD, postnatal anxiety, and a host of medical complications including Lupus, Asherman’s syndrome, a second haemorrhage, and a stoma bag. Despite these challenges, she and Ryan are determined to grow their family—and she has spoken candidly about the bittersweet nature of her new path to motherhood.
In a heartfelt Instagram post, Louise reflected on the complexity of emotions she has experienced while watching friends and family celebrate pregnancies. “Before I get into it, I want to say something that might sound a little contradictory,” she wrote. “I am genuinely, wholeheartedly happy for every person who has announced a pregnancy on my feed lately—but at the same time, it has quietly been eroding away at my heart.”
Louise framed her honesty not as a cry for help, but as a message for anyone who has ever felt a mixture of joy and grief simultaneously. “You are not alone, and you are not a bad person for feeling two things at once. Joy and grief, love and longing, pride and pain… these things are not really opposites; instead, they are neighbours, and sometimes they sit so closely together you can barely tell where one ends and the other begins.”
Reflecting on her own birth trauma, Louise admitted she had spent years clinging to any slivers of joy she could find. “As long as I experienced 5% of joy in one day, and 6% the next, I’d see that as a win. Even on days when I felt completely hollowed out, if I could just make my dogs happy on a walk, a tiny bit of their joy might find its way back to me.” She emphasized that grief and joy can work in tandem, offering hope to those navigating similar experiences.
The reality of her medical condition means Louise cannot carry another child herself. “I don’t have a hospitable womb. I haven’t had a period in four years, not since I had my son,” she explained. “For a long time, I moved forward with such determined speed that I didn’t stop to properly mourn what that actually meant… Currently, I still feel a little broken inside.”
Louise spoke about the profound shift she has experienced as friends begin welcoming their second, third, and even fourth children. “Something has shifted. I’ve started remembering the good parts of my own pregnancy. For years, my brain only kept the difficult memories on the surface—the scary ones. It turns out that’s just how our brains work. We are wired to hold onto danger, to protect us from repeating what hurt us. The beautiful memories were always there; they were just quietly waiting in the wings for the right moment.”
Despite the grief, Louise has embraced surrogacy as a path forward. “I told myself it was our only option, and I embraced it, because what else do you do? You propel yourself forward. You find the path, and you don’t look down. You cling onto the distraction of what is essentially another full-time job.”
She candidly described the financial and emotional reality of the process: “Surrogacy is a miracle. I genuinely believe that. It is also likely to cost me over £50,000 with all the rounds of IVF included, which is its own kind of grief, and it means that my path to motherhood will always be wonderfully, painfully different.”
Louise reflected on the aspects of pregnancy she will never experience herself: “I will never feel a baby kick inside me. I will never feel that particular heaviness where you can’t breathe properly or lie on your side… the kind that makes you slow down, order maternity leggings, and lie on the sofa with complete permission.” She added, “Nobody will walk toward me in the street and clock my bump. Nobody will say ‘congratulations’ without being told. I will never see a heartbeat flickering on a screen inside my own body.”
Louise stressed that her grief is not a reflection of jealousy or bitterness but a natural response to loss. “Grief doesn’t always look like weeping. Sometimes it looks like pausing on someone else’s joy and noticing the shape of what’s missing in your own life. That is allowed. It doesn’t make you jealous, bitter, or small. It makes you human.”
Earlier this month, Louise shared a milestone from their IVF journey: one embryo “in the freezer.” She described the moment as a mixture of relief, hope, and reflection on the long, painstaking process: “Years of planning, weeks of needles, scans, waiting rooms, clenched jaws, forced optimism, and tears… It’s the kind of bravery nobody gives you a medal for—and why would they, because we’ve chosen to pay to go through this process when we could just… not.”
Louise offered a glimpse into the meticulous care involved in IVF. “From our first cycle, we went from seeing 20+ good-looking follicles on the scan, to getting 8 eggs retrieved, holding onto hope that many of them would make it to day five. One embryo. One possibility. Not the perfect outcome. That feels like an okay place to start. So we’re letting ourselves process that. One in the freezer. One in our hearts.”
Throughout her reflections, Louise highlighted the importance of allowing oneself to grieve while maintaining hope. “Choosing a different path to parenthood—whether that’s surrogacy, adoption, or fostering—is not a consolation prize. But it is okay to grieve the path you didn’t get to walk,” she wrote.
She concluded with a deeply personal message: “I don’t know exactly where I’m going with all of this yet. But I wanted to say it out loud… For me, and maybe for someone else reading this who has been carrying the same quiet thing. You don’t have to be fine about everything. You’re allowed to feel the loss and still show up with hope… But somewhere along the way, I’ve come to believe it’s exactly those unexpected routes that tend to make us into someone worth knowing.”
Louise’s story is a poignant reminder of the complexities of motherhood, fertility, and the emotional toll of reproductive challenges. Her honesty and courage offer solidarity to others facing similar struggles, showing that grief and joy can coexist, and that the path to parenthood can take many forms—each worthy of love, attention, and hope.
