What It’s Like To Lose A Baby At 20 Weeks Of Pregnancy

Too Tired Mums is The Singapore Women’s Weekly’s original talk show series that gives motherhood its most honest voice — where real mums open up about the things we don’t always say out loud, reminding us that we’re never truly alone.

For many expectant mothers, the 20-week scan is a joyous milestone — a chance to finally see the baby’s progress and perhaps learn their gender. Twenty weeks is also the midpoint of pregnancy where everything is supposed to feel more certain, more real.

But for Kelly, this routine scan turned into a life-altering tragedy.

“When the sonographer put the wand on my belly, I knew immediately that something was wrong,” she recalls. “There was just no sound, no movement… nothing. It was just silence.”

Everything happened too fast

What followed was a blur of decisions no parent ever expects to make.

“Everything moved really quickly,” Kelly says. “I had to see the doctor again… to decide how we would deliver him, and when.”

There is something particularly cruel about how grief can feel in these moments — the way love and loss are suddenly reduced to timelines, procedures, and paperwork.

When her baby was delivered, it was Kelly’s husband who saw him first.

“He described everything to me,” she shares. “Ten fingers, ten toes. Perfect face. Looks like one of our kids.”

The decisions no one prepares you for

Even after birth, the decisions didn’t stop.

“We had to decide what we wanted to do with him,” Kelly says. “We chose to cremate him.”

She describes feeling almost numb in the immediate aftermath. “I was pretty much devoid of emotions… until we went home.”

And then, it hit.

Grief, through a child’s eyes

“My older kids asked me how everything was, how I was,” she says. “Seeing how affected they were… that hit me more than anything else.”

At the funeral home, the reality of the loss became even more tangible.

“He was in this really small box,” Kelly recalls. “Too small to go into a hearse.”

Her two older sons chose to sit with their baby brother in the undertaker’s car on the way to the crematorium.

“They held on to him while they were driving,” she says. “They were clearly upset, but they wanted to do something for their brother.”

The questions that don’t have answers

Each of her children was affected on a different level.

Her six-year-old daughter is still trying to make sense of it.

“She asks me why he had to go before he even came to our family,” Kelly shares. “She says things like, ‘I was really hoping to have him to play with.’”

But her oldest felt it the most deeply. “He could process everything.”

Sometimes, understanding makes the loss even harder to carry.

When loss reshapes what matters

In the months that followed, Kelly saw how the loss changed her family’s perspective on life.

Her husband, once firmly “work first,” began to see things differently.

“This loss has reshaped the way he tackles work,” she says. “He told me that the small things are equally as important now.”

It was something they had talked about for years, but it took this for it to truly land.

Watch Kelly’s full story in this episode.

Holding space for the stories we don’t often tell

Pregnancy loss is still something many families go through quietly, often without the space to fully process what they’ve experienced.

For Kelly, it changed the way her family shows up for one another.

Today, she is 25 weeks pregnant with her sixth child.

It’s a new chapter — one that comes with hope, and the understanding that love and loss can exist at the same time.

Host: Estelle Low
Guest: Kelly Ang
Producer: Maya Eman
Art director: Michelle Lee
Videography, studio setup and editing: Studio+65
Makeup: Dorcas Yam, using Dior
Hairstyling: Pattama Phumriew, using Schwarzkopf Osis+
Fashion styling: Angela Chu
Outfits: All stylist’s own