Montana Brown opens up about struggle to conceive before son’s birth

The ex-‘Love Island’ star says she was ‘shocked’ at the difficulty because she is still in her twenties

Montana Brown has opened up about the struggle to get pregnant with her first child despite being in her twenties.

The former Love Island star, 27, gave birth to her and fiancé Mark O’Connor’s son Jude last month – but said she was shocked that it was difficult to conceive in the first place.

Speaking to Giovanna Fletcher on herHappy Mum Happy Baby podcast, Brown said she thought “something was wrong” with her when she first started trying to get pregnant but couldn’t.

“I thought, ‘We’re young, this is going to be really easy’… for the first four months we’d used ovulation sticks, and then I’d do a pregnancy test and it’d be negative,” she recalled.

“And I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, that is so hurtful’ and then you do that month after month.

“Then I was kind of overthinking, is there something wrong with me, should I be getting checked?”

Brown joked that she also sent O’Connor to the fertility clinic to check his sperm and recalled: “I said, ‘There’s something wrong with your sperm! You need to get it checked out, it’s not me!’”

But in the end, both parties went to check their fertility and found that “everything was fine”.

“So, Mark loves going in the sauna and also he’s an avid cycler, two things which are not good for sperm, which I did not know,” the reality star continued.

“I also found out I had no oestrogen and no testosterone. It kind of left me a bit like, ‘Oh, I can be young, fit and healthy, and still really, really struggle to conceive’.”

When she did eventually fall pregnant, Brown said it was a surprise and she thought her symptoms – which included tiredness, nausea and hot sweats – were because of food poisoning.

“For some reason, like clockwork in the evenings, I was having hot sweats,” Brown said. “I had stabbing pains. And I was being sick every night.

“I said to Mark, ‘I’ve got food poisoning’. And he was like, ‘I don’t think you do… you’re definitely pregnant’.

“I said, ‘Mark, please, come on, we had sex that one time… this is not happening, there’s no way’. So I really avoided taking a pregnancy test. I genuinely was so convinced I was just ill.”

However, O’Connor insisted that she take a pregnancy test and ordered her one via Deliveroo. Brown said she agreed to take the test “just to shut [him] up”.

“I just remember weeing on the stick and just being like, ‘Yeah, it’s not loaded yet’. Just kind of a bit blasé. And then I just remember seeing it and I was like, ‘Oh my God’.”

According to Brown, O’Connor, who was FaceTiming her as she took the test, was in disbelief even though he had been right.

“He was like, ‘No, you’re joking’. I was like, ‘I’m not joking, it says pregnant!’”

The couple welcomed their baby boy, named Jude Isaiah O’Connor, on 23 June and said they were “so smitten”.

In the early days of her pregnancy, Brown said she experienced “excruciating pain”, which led her to think she had “a gall stone or appendicitis” rather than being pregnant.

Montana and O’Connor announced their engagement in April, after he proposed to her on a beach in Bermuda. They met in 2020 and went “Instagram official” with their relationship the year after.

She was a contestant in series three of the ITV reality dating show, where she was coupled up with Alex Beattie by the end of the series. However, the pair broke up shortly after leaving the villa.