Gypsy Rose Blanchard is a mom.
The Gypsy Rose: Life After Lockup star and boyfriend Ken Urker have welcomed their first child.
Urker shared the news that the pair had become parents with a New Year’s Day Instagram post.
The post featured a photo of Blanchard in a hospital bed cradling a baby, with Urker leaning in. Both appear to be lovingly looking at the child, who is sporting a pink hat.
“Welcoming 2025 with the greatest gift of all,” he captioned the post.
TMZ reported that Blanchard gave birth on Dec. 28 in Louisiana to a baby girl, whom they named Aurora Urker. Blanchard told People in December that she and Urker had picked Aurora as their baby name when they were first together during her time in prison.
“Both of us have a fascination with the northern lights, and the proper term is the aurora borealis,” Blanchard said. “I think it was maybe in 2018, we wrote each other’s future kid’s name on pieces of paper and Aurora is what we both picked without even knowing each other was picking it.”
She added that she and Urker hope to someday see the northern lights, planning to go to Sweden after she’s off parole.
The birth date is exactly one year after Blanchard was released from prison. Blanchard was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2016 after she pleaded guilty to persuading her online boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn to kill her mother, Dee Dee, who had forced her daughter to pretend she was suffering from serious illnesses like leukemia and muscular dystrophy. The younger Blanchard was released on parole on Dec. 28, 2023 after serving 85 percent of her original sentence.
Blanchard, whose story has been told numerous times, including in Hulu’s The Act and an HBO documentary, was featured in two Lifetime docuseries in 2024, The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, which debuted last January and included interviews while she was behind bars, and Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up, which debuted in June and documents her post-prison life.
Blanchard also spent last year divorcing husband Ryan Anderson, whom she met and wed while in prison, and reuniting with ex-fiancé Urker, whom she also met in prison. She also released a memoir, My Time to Stand, in December.
She announced that she was expecting her first child in July, saying at the time, in a since-deleted YouTube video, that she was 11 weeks along and that the pregnancy was “not planned” and “completely unexpected.” On her Instagram account, which appears to have been taken down, Blanchard said the baby was due in January 2025.
“I know that there are going to be people who feel like I’m not ready to be a mother, and I don’t know if anyone’s really ready to become a mother,” Blanchard said in the YouTube video, adding, “When I found out I was pregnant, nothing else mattered,” including social media drama.
As for her thoughts on becoming a mother, she said, “It’s an amazing feeling when your whole world shifts. And suddenly it’s not about you; it’s not about anything other than the tiny little life that’s inside you that you are now in charge of protecting. And that little tiny life is a baby, a little tiny human that’s yours, that you have to make sure that you protect, you love, you take care of, and all of the things that I wished I could have had when I was little.”
“All the things that I wanted in a mother, I want to give to this baby,” she continued, getting emotional. “Knowing that, I am a mother now, and I am happy, and I just want to be a good mother for my child. I want to be everything my mother wasn’t.”
In a May interview with The Hollywood Reporter Blanchard said she was “finally happy” with Urker.