Australian TV host Carrie Bickmore learned of her miscarriage on the day of a show segment that she did not want to miss

Australian TV host Carrie Bickmore in May 2025.Credit : Don Arnold/WireImage

Australian TV personality Carrie Bickmore is reflecting on a difficult time in her personal and professional life.

The 44-year-old former co-host of the recently ended current events show The Project recalled miscarrying before going on the air in 2018.

During a podcast interview with several of her former Project co-hosts on the Hit Network’s the Carrie & Tommy Podcast, Bickmore opened up about the heartbreaking moment she decided to go on-air despite learning she had miscarried and needed medical attention.

“Now I do feel embarrassed to say it, but I’ll never forget Lisa’s first night on The Project,” she said of her former co-host Lisa Wilkinson. “I’ll never forget it because I had just discovered that I’d lost a baby, I’d had a miscarriage.”

Carrie Bickmore and Lisa Wilkinson in 2019. Faith Moran/Wireimage

Bickmore said her doctor advised her to get a D&C surgical procedure, to remove pregnancy tissue in the wake of the miscarriage and she replied, “I can’t because Lisa Wilkinson is making her first appearance on The Project tonight.”

At the time, Bickmore and Wilkinson, 65, had been depicted in the press as feuding — something that Bickmore said was far from the truth.

“Lisa and I had the most fabulous professional relationship. Professional respect,” Bickmore said. “Because of the way sexism works but also because there are less jobs — it’s hard to have two prominent women on one show at the same time. It became Lisa against Carrie and there was article after article about the war we were at. And I was so confused.”

Carrie Bickmore and Lisa Wilkinson in 2022. Lisa Wilkinson/Instagram

So Bickmore insisted on being there for Wilkinson’s first night on The Project rather than immediately undergoing the procedure at her doctor’s suggestion.

“For me, the repercussions of not being on air the first night Lisa was there to welcome her and to make her feel welcome, but the public perception… I can tell you what it would have been. ‘I refused to show up,’” Bickmore said.

“And the repercussions of that felt so much more overwhelming than the idea of waiting. So I sat on air that night, knowing that I had a baby that had passed away inside of me as I pretended to be laughing and having a great time because that was the power the outside world to what was happening inside.”

Bickmore concluded that the moment is an upsetting example of “the power of pitting women against each other.”

Lisa Wilkinson and Carrie Bickmore in 2018. Carrie Bickmore/Instagram

“It became a self-fulfilling prophecy really because Lisa and I were never at war, but the more you read that and the more you start to feel insecure about your own abilities,” she said. “I was pregnant at the time so I started not being able to do as many of the opportunities and Lisa would do them. In my head, I’d be like, ‘Oh my god, am I going to have a job?’ All these things I look back now on and I wish I’d just thought about so differently.”

Bickmore left The Project in 2022; Wilkinson followed soon after. The show aired its final episode earlier this month.

Bickmore has of three children: one son born in 2007 with her late husband Greg Lange, and two children born in 2015 and 2018, whom she shares with her ex-partner Chris Walker.