Love Island UK's Alex and Olivia Bowen Share They Were Expecting Twins — But Lost One Baby Due to Vanishing Twin Syndrome

Mar. 15, 2025

Alex and Olivia Bowen.Photo:Gareth Cattermole/Getty

Gareth Cattermole/Getty

Alex and Olivia Bowenare opening up about a traumatic loss.

The couple, who met while starring in season 2 ofLove Island UK, appeared on a Tuesday, Mar. 4, episode of the British talk showLoose Womenand discussed a recent loss they’d experienced.

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Speaking about their first doctor’s appointment, Olivia says they went at six weeks, which is “super early.”

“I am quite an anxious person anyway, so I was like, right, I’m going to the scan early. You were all for it,” she says, gesturing towards Alex. “We turn up. We actually had our friend in the back of the car cuz we thought, ‘Oh yeah, everything’ll be normal.’”

Alex notes that he didn’t even know what he was looking at on the screen when he saw that there were two babies.

“I have twins in my family, and as soon as we found out it was twins, I was already quite nervous because we’ve not had a great history of twins in our family. But you were so positive, weren’t you?” Olivia continues, turning to Alex.

“Yeah, I mean, obviously when you find out that you’re having twins, you’re kind of like, all these emotions run through your mind," Alex says. “And you’re like, oh my god, another two on top of the one that we got. And then five minutes later, I was kind of like, had these scenarios in my mind. Like, I can’t wait until we’re on holiday and checking the back of the car, all three kids are playing. And then yeah, unfortunately, that just got kind of taken away.”

The couple goes on to say that at their six-week appointment, one of the twins was a little smaller but still had a heartbeat, so the doctors weren’t concerned. However, when they returned for the eight-week appointment, something was different.

“But as Alex said, we had that two-week period where we were looking at cars, we were looking at car seats, we were planning bedrooms. And we went back at eight, and something happened called vanishing twin syndrome,” says Olivia.

“One of the babies just basically didn’t have a heartbeat. But I’d had no symptoms, I’d had no pain. No bleeding. Absolutely nothing to tell me that that was what we were walking into, and I guess from that moment we were just completely floored,” she continues. “We were expecting to have these two little babies, but vanishing twin syndrome, that is what happens. They can, as it says, literally just vanish.”

According to theCleveland Clinic, vanishing twin syndrome is a “miscarriage that causes a pregnancy involving twins to become a pregnancy involving one embryo. It occurs when one of the embryos detected during an ultrasound stops developing.”

“The one beautiful part of it that I try to hold onto is that they do absorb into your body, so they just gradually go back into your body. Those cells become a part of you, and that’s what we’ve sort of been holding onto,” Olivia says.

source: people.com