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Louise Thomas
Editor
Gypsy Rose Blanchard has been opening up about her pregnancy.
The 32-year-old media personality first announced that she was expecting her first child with her former fiancé, Ken Urker, on July 9 via an Instagram post and a YouTube video. On Friday July 12, she explained in an interview with Good Morning America how she would handle telling her future child about her mother’s death.
Blanchard served more than eight years in Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri after plotting to murder her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, in 2015 with then-boyfriend Nicholas “Nick” Godejohn, before being released in December 2023.
She had first met her child’s father, Urker, while serving her sentence in 2018. The two were engaged by 2019 although Urker called it off in 2020. Blanchard had then connected with her pen pal, Ryan Anderson, whom she married in 2022. She filed for divorce from Anderson back in March, only three months after her release from prison, and later reconnected with Urker.
“That question has plagued my mind for a long time,” she said, when asked if her child would ever know about her prison sentence. “And I’ve come to a point where I understand that that question is going to be asked by my child someday.
“So I feel like when that time comes, Ken and I will sit down and have that conversation and I will explain in the most honest way possible.”
She also took the time to respond to critics that questioned whether or not she would be a good parent. “I understand that with my past, there’s gonna be a lot of people that kind of question if I even should be a mother or even have children in my care,” Blanchard said.
“I know that I’m not perfect. I know that I have made mistakes in the past. And I will probably make minor mistakes going forward. But at the same time, I do know right from wrong. And learning from past mistakes is a growth that comes with time.”
One of her main goals in being a parent is to give her future child a life that she was not able to experience herself growing up in an abusive environment, she explained.
“My mother did not want to see me meet those milestones that every child should have, like going on a first date, a prom, you know, a bike ride. All of those little milestone moments that make life worth living, I didn’t get to have that,” she said. “And so I want my child to have all of the things that he or she could ever want in life.”
And although Blanchard’s life has been made public through her Lifetime docuseries titled Gypsy Rose: Life After Lockup, she did mention that she wouldn’t want her own child to be on camera.
“Once the baby’s born, I really feel strongly that I don’t want my baby to be in front of a camera, unless it’s for, like, home movies,” Blanchard said. “I will not be putting my child in the media at all.”
“This world is so cruel and unsafe that there is a level of responsibility that I have to make sure that my child is protected,” she added.
