Gypsy Rose Blanchard welcomes first child

Gypsy Rose Blanchard is a mother.

The Gypsy Rose: Life After Lockup star and boyfriend Ken Urker have welcomed their first child.

Urker shared the news that the couple had become parents with one Instagram post New Year’s Day.

The post featured a photo of Blanchard in a hospital bed cradling a baby, with Urker leaning in. Both appear to be looking lovingly at the child, who is wearing a pink hat.

“Welcome 2025 with the greatest gift of all,” he captioned the post.

TMZ reported that Blanchard gave birth on December 28 in Louisiana to a little girl whom they named Aurora Urker. Blanchard told People in December that she and Urker had chosen 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 northern lights,” Blanchard said. “I think it was maybe 2018, we wrote each other’s future child’s name on pieces of paper and Aurora is what we both chose without even knowing each other chose it.”

She added that she and Urker hope to one day see the northern lights and plan to go to Sweden when she is free of parole.

The date of birth 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 such as leukemia and muscular dystrophy. The younger Blanchard was released on parole on Dec. 28, 2023, after serving 85 percent of his original sentence.

Blanchard, whose story has been told numerous times, including on Hulu’s The law and an HBO documentary, was featured in two Lifetime docuseries in 2024, The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchardwhich debuted last January and included interviews while she was behind bars, and Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Upwhich debuted in June and documents her life after prison.

Blanchard also spent last year divorcing husband Ryan Anderson, whom she met and married while in prison, and reuniting with ex-fiance Urker, whom she also met in prison. She also published a memoir, My time to standin December.

She announced 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 “unplanned” 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 there are going to be people who feel like I’m not ready to be a mom, and I don’t know if anyone is really ready to be a mom,” 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 changes. And suddenly it’s not about you; it’s not about anything but the tiny little life inside you, that you are now responsible for protecting. And that tiny life is a baby, a tiny human that is yours to protect, to love, to take care of, and all the things that that I wish I could have had when I was little.”

“All the things I wanted in a mother, I will give to this baby,” she continued, becoming emotional. “Knowing that, I’m a mother now and I’m happy and I just want to be a good mother to my child. I want to be everything my mother was not.”

In a May interview with The Hollywood Reporter Blanchard said she was “finally happy” with Urker.