‘You can’t deny it’: Actress reacts to ex Home and Away star’s raw baby admission

This article discusses pregnancy loss, which some readers may find distressing. 

Sarah Roberts is “longing” for a baby, but her partner “doesn’t want children” and the actress is wondering what all her feelings “mean”. That was the deeply personal revelation the former Home and Away star made in the middle of a podcast interview with Australian actress Debra Lawrance this month.

Sarah, 41, and her Cracking On podcast co-host Sam Frost, 37, had been interviewing Debra when the conversation touched upon four miscarriages Debra had suffered along her own path to parenthood.

It led Sarah to discuss two miscarriages she had gone through during her four-year marriage to fellow Home and Away star James Stewart.

“I know I absolutely wasn’t with the right man at the time – so in the end it was a blessing in disguise – but it’s so confusing to me because I still feel the pain,” Sarah – who is now dating cinematographer and artist Jake Iesu – told Debra.

“I still know what day they would have been born. How old they would have been. I see little kids in my family that would have been the same age. Does that pain and that feeling ever leave your body?”

Her question led Debra, now 69, to acknowledge it was a “big thing” – and share more about her own experience, which involved the tragic loss of identical twin girls.

“The twins was hard,” Debra shared. “The other two was my last year at Home and Away and I miscarried on a Friday after the end of the studio day and had the D&C in hospital on the weekend and got back to rehearsal on the Monday. 

“Nobody’s the wiser. And then a couple of months later, exactly the same thing happened. My body went ‘oh no we won’t do this until Friday afternoon’.”

Debra – who is married to her former Home and Away co-star Dennis Coard – said she had done a lot of research and so she understood the medical reasons why a miscarriage might happen, which helped her process it.

But the following year she lost her twin baby girls, 16 weeks into the pregnancy.

“I’d already named them and was worrying about university fees,” the star admitted. “You plan into the future. I figure you grieve for the future that you’d planned which has occurred in your brain.”

Debra said that advice she had received from a “spiritual teacher” helped her to sit with the pain and, ultimately, let it go.

“The pain is your mind still projecting into your created future… which doesn’t exist,” Debra told Sarah. “That means you can undo it.

“This little one is still waiting to come in, and still waiting to land but they’ve just gone ‘I’ll wait, Mum’. If you start seeing it from that point of view, then that instantly… makes it easy.”

That’s when Sarah – whose boyfriend is currently based in Vancouver for work –  made a deeply personal revelation: that “deep down” she felt she was “longing” for a child.

“I am with a partner that doesn’t want children, so there are all these things I’m playing with at the moment,” the star shared. “You know, what do all these feelings mean?”

Debra was candid in her response to the star’s struggle.

“If that longing is really in you, it means you’re being called to be a mum,” she said, as Sarah’s co-host Sam nodded.

“It’s biological for, heaven’s sake, and you can’t deny it.”