Kip Sabian & Penelope Ford’s Resilience After Losing Baby: Finding Silver Linings and Hope

Penelope Ford and Kip Sabian gained recognition for their work on the independent scene. The duo signed with AEW back in 2019 and have largely been featured in the midcard scene. That said, Sabian and Ford went through a personal tragedy after she suffered a miscarriage.

While speaking on the AEW Unrestricted podcast, Kip Sabian opened up about Penelope Ford’s miscarriage. Sabian revealed that while he was on the shelf due to injury, they came to know they were expecting a baby. Obviously, they were worried about how it would affect their careers.

They eventually worked up the courage to speak to Tony Khan about Penelope Ford having to miss out on a year of in-ring action due to her pregnancy. Tony Khan was overjoyed and supportive about the news and offered to help them in any way he could.

However, their happiness was short-lived as about ten weeks into the pregnancy, they lost the baby. The miscarriage devasted them for many reasons as the couple had it all worked out in order to balance their family life as well as pro wrestling. Ford’s pregnancy had caused a fibroid to grow to the size of a cantaloupe, which required surgery and a long recovery period.

“I was in limbo at this point (during his injury) and then me and Olivia (Penelope Ford) got pregnant. It was like a light in this situation, but we were very nervous about it. I will go into details about this situation. We finally go in to talk to Tony. No one knows. The only person that knows is Doc. There has to be a reason that she can’t wrestle right now. You just can’t not wrestle. We tell Doc, okay, cool. We finally go into talk to Tony and we are so nervous because you’re going to your boss to say, ‘Hi, she’s not going to be able to wrestle for a year or so, maybe longer now. How do you feel about that?’ So we went in, and were like, ‘Hi Tony. We got some news to tell you’, and the second we told him, if you’ve seen Tony Khan on an AEW stage when a talent has debuted, and they come up the ramp, and he is so excited and so happy and he just jumps and hugs them, that is the moment that we had in Tony’s office with Tony. He had papers in his hand for the show, he threw the papers, and just came over and was so excited. He was like, ‘Whatever you need, however long you need, I support you’, and we were like, ah, weight lifted. Now we can get excited.”

“Then unfortunately for us, about 10 weeks or so, we lost the baby, which, for me was very hard for two reasons. One, we’d got really excited about the fact that we can have a baby because we’ve always wanted children. We just didn’t know with wrestling how we would make that fit. But we’d worked out the time frame and the fact that we have such a supportive family, that we would still be able to work our schedule. Two days a week, we’re gone. We come back, you know, family life. So we were really getting into it. Then it was actually when we were traveling to TV one day, we got in the car, and then it happened. I had to call Bryce straightaway from travel. I said, ‘Dude, we can’t make it in this week. I’ll tell you later. It’s a personal emergency.’ He’s like, ‘Okay, cool. I’ll let everyone know.’

“When she got pregnant, the hormones that changed made the fibroid grow. By the time that we had a miscarriage, it was the size of a cantaloupe. She had this huge growth. It was sticking out. It looked like a bump. We thought we were having twins for a long time because of that, because it was that big. So she’d have to go through the surgery of having that removed. You know, not only have you lost this life, but now you have to go through surgery and rehab and recovery as if you had a C-section. So for her, that was really hard.”

“It’s got to the point now that we look at the silver lining, which is, in my mind, this fibroid has always been there and they can cause complications when they get to that size. So I look at it as this baby sacrificed itself to make us aware of this fibroid so the fibroid could be removed, so when we get pregnant again in the future, the complications are gone. That’s how we’ve tried to look at it. I can’t speak on her behalf, but from my perspective of everything, that definitely gives me hope.”

Penelope Ford had to take a break from in-ring competition and televised appearances due to her miscarriage and surgery. We send our support to Penelope Ford and pray she will recover from this experience.

What are your thoughts on Tony Khan’s supportive response to Kip Sabian and Penelope Ford’s personal situation? Leave a comment.