Eve may be a happily married mother and bonus mom now, but she is ready to share that she’s one of many women who has endured multiple adverse pregnancy outcomes and complications.
Ahead of the release of her upcoming book “Who’s That Girl? A Memoir,” published by HarperCollins on Sept. 17, the rapper-actress, 45, has revealed her complex motherhood journey and that it involved having to hide an ectopic pregnancy she experienced while filming her sitcom “Eve” in 2006.
“I told them all it was appendicitis,” she writes of the trauma in an excerpt of her upcoming memoir.
“It was called a tubal pregnancy, where the embryonic sac ruptured in my one fallopian tube. It’s also known as an ectopic pregnancy,” she continued. “I had to have emergency surgery and stop filming the show for two weeks. I don’t know why I lied to everyone on set and said that my appendix had ruptured, really. Maybe because I was lying to myself.”
She shared she lost “so much” weight following the procedure and the pressure that added to the starlet who still had to walk red carpets at that time.
“It’s like I’ve said before, sometimes I did whatever it took to show up and get the job done … even if it was to my own detriment,” she wrote.
According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, an ectopic pregnancy is an adverse pregnancy complication in which the fetus develops outside of the uterus. Ectopic pregnancies, which impact roughly 2% of pregnancies, cannot be safely carried to full term. The life-saving care Eve received in 2006 is currently up for debate in many parts of the country. Black women also experience ectopic pregnancies at disproportionate rates to their white counterparts.
In the almost two decades since that incident, the singer and actress took a step back from the entertainment industry, married British businessman Maximillion Cooper, 52, and welcomed their first child together, a son, Wilde Wolf, 2. Speaking to People magazine about the book and her life now, she told the publication how “grateful” she is; Eve’s motherhood journey has reportedly also involved miscarriage, surgery to remove fibroids and multiple rounds of in vitro fertilization.
“You question yourself, your body, the universe, God, so many things,” she told the publication. “I told my husband [about the miscarriage] when we got close, but never ever spoke about it in public, not even [while I was hosting] ‘The Talk.’”
While filming the show “Queens” in 2021, her pregnancy with Wilde began on uncertain footing as he came from a mosaic embryo — an embryo that has different proportions of both normal and abnormal cells, increasing the chances of complications. Accordingly, she kept the fact that she was expecting to herself for months until she was more comfortable with how it was developing.
“I couldn’t tell anybody then because it was such a new pregnancy,” she explained, adding, “I, 100%, was acting like an absolute crazy person [on set]. It was baking in L.A., so I was asking for ice to be put down my back. When I finally told the girls that I was pregnant months into shooting, they were like, ‘That’s why you were acting crazy. Thank God that you weren’t a psycho diva.’”
Eve credits Wilde with helping her heal and process her difficult journey to motherhood — and her past in general.
She told People magazine, “Having my son has a lot to do with feeling like I can talk about this past stuff, because here is — literally — my future,” she says. “I don’t have anything to chase beyond the things that I want to build for him, [and] us as a family.”