Oprah Winfrey has spoken candidly about her teenage miscarriage, revealing she had no connection to her baby.
The talk show queen was on the other end of searching questions when she agreed to be the first guest on British newsman Piers Morgan's new CNN show, which aired on Monday (17Jan11) - and she agreed to talk openly about falling pregnant at 14 and then losing her child.
After confessing she has never regretted not having children, Winfrey told the host she knew that she only became pregnant because of "bad choices and not having boundaries and the abuse, sexual abuse, from the time I was nine", and she was relieved when she lost the child.
Oprah explained, "I knew then that when I lost that baby, for whom I had no connection to whatsoever... I was 14 years old and felt nothing but just, OK, relieved, because I thought before the baby was born, I'm gonna have to kill myself.
"My mother said you can't stay here, so I had to move to live with my father in Nashville."
But she told Morgan she kept her pregnancy from her traditionalist father, who never knew she was with child.
Winfrey recalled, "My father, as a part of his decree about what's gonna go on in this house... said to me... 'These are the rules of the house, you are gonna obey the rules; you have a 10 o'clock curfew and I would rather see a daughter of mine floating down the Cumberland River than to bring shame on this family and the indecency of an illegitimate child.
"He's saying that to me and I know that I am pregnant."
Oprah insisted she never really came close to taking her own life but revealed she once drank detergent "to try and get attention", but the whole experience has helped her relate to "young girls who are in that situation".
The talk show host never got to take her dead baby home from the hospital and she saw the miscarriage as her second chance to make something of her life.
She added, "I went back to school and nobody knew, because had anybody have known at that time I wouldn't have been able to be head of the student council... I wouldn't have been able to be Miss Fire Prevention, I wouldn't have been chosen as one of the two teenagers from the state of Tennessee to go to the White House conference on youth.
"None of those things would have happened and the whole trajectory of my life would have been different."