Strictly's Oti Mabuse admits 'I was lucky' as she shares premature childbirth struggle

Former Strictly Come Dancing star Oti Mabuse has spoken about her pain and how lucky she feels that her daughter lived after being 8 weeks premature

Oti Mabuse has spoken about how "lucky" she feels that her eight week premature baby survived - even though she feels guilt that she arrived early.

The former Strictly Come Dancing star and TV star gave birth in December was born prematurely with an infection and spent six weeks in intensive care after Oti developed sepsis during pregnancy. "There were moments where she wouldn't eat, feeding her was really tough. "In South Africa and Romania, they don't help children who are born as young as she was, so we were very, very lucky,” said Oti, 34, who was born and raised in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, while her fellow pro dancer husband Marius Lepure, 42, was born in Satu Mare, Romania, in north-west Transylvania.

Marius added: "I knew there was nothing better we can do. I saw babies where If it would have been that week in Romania they would not have saved the baby. We are lucky."

Oti said: "The pregnancy itself was beautiful, it was amazing but I had a spontaneous birth where we were going shopping and my waters just broke in the middle of the street.

"Because I didn't have any experience of birth it didn't see traumatic at the time. Afterwards I felt that was intense. And when you look at milestones of premature babies, I have to be very, very understanding. The trauma came after."

In the new joint interview with her husband, Oti also admitted she finds it hard not to blame herself for the premature birth and was full of praise for the nursing team at London’s University College Hospital for saving their baby.

“They are absolutely brilliant. Those nurses deal with babies this size, with organs that are this tiny. They give them such beautiful care. They are protecting them.”

Oti and Marius announced the birth of their daughter - whose name they have never revealed - on Christmas Day 2023, 24 hours after she was discharged from hospital following a gruelling six week battle for life.

“The baby was sick. She couldn’t breathe on her own, she couldn’t eat on her own. She was really small. We couldn't hold her. That was incredibly, incredibly tough,” recalls Oti, who describes being inconsolable one evening as she drove home from hospital listening to Christmas songs playing on the radio.

“I was just like, ‘This is horrible. How can in this world, this beautiful thing - Christmas - happen?’. I cried for an hour. You’ve just given birth, postpartum is tough, so I still had all those hormones… It was really, really tough. I was at my lowest.”
Looking back, Oti regrets overexerting herself during pregnancy and questions whether things might have been different had she slowed down.

"One of the things I don't try to do anymore is prove I am still good enough.

“I wanted to prove that pregnant women can work, can dance. I was working so many jobs at that time and now I sit here and I think, ‘Why did I do that? Who the hell was I trying to prove that I can still work on television, that I’m still intelligent, that I can still dance. Why was I doing all of that?’
“I had all these questions going through my head of how I would redo it if we're lucky enough to have another baby. I’m going to sit at home now and wait and do everything the doctors tell me, so that I don't have a spontaneous birth again.”

Something else Oti is determined to not repeat is the family dynamic she experienced growing up within "a real African household” where her lawyer dad - “the head of the family”, the “breadwinner” - was unavailable emotionally to Oti and her two siblings, Strictly judge Motsi Mabuse, 43, and Phemelo, 38.

“I didn't want the family that I came from [to] affect the family that comes from me," says Oti. “I don't want my daughter to have that trauma that I have. I don't want her to have daddy issues.

“I don't want that hierarchy. I want [our daughter] to be able to go to my husband with a problem. I want her to not be scared to say her opinion, to say, 'No, mommy, No, daddy. I don't want that’. I want her to have those boundaries.

“My dad is absolutely amazing, but that cultural way of living is not what I want.”

on Instagram Oti has been an open book about her thoughts on her post baby body, sharing updates about recently dropping from a size 18 to 10 ahead of her June 2025 UK dance tour, Viva Carnival.

And speaking to coach Paul Carrick Brunson on the latest episode of his podcast We Need To Talk(PLS REF), Oti slams the pressure that new mums are under to “snap back” to their pre-pregnancy bodies.

“I’m only now on my ‘Let’s get healthy train’ and it took about nine, eight months for me to get there. You see a lot of people - models, actresses - that I feel are even thinner than what they were when they had babies. It’s almost like they want to erase that time of ‘I was big, I was swollen, my body was providing for a human being’. I [didn’t] want to put myself under that pressure.”

Oti is the only pro to win Strictly two years in a row in 2019 and 2020 with Kelvin Fletcher and then Bill Bailey. She went on then to become a judge on Dancing On Ice. She married Romanian dancer Marius in 2014 after meeting in Germany. Marius told her 'I love you' just a week after meeting.

Oti says became so consumed by working on Strictly that she "wasn't really in" her own marriage, and ended up breaking down in the shower fully clothed.

She said: “Strictly is not a TV show. It's a lifestyle choice. It is all you think about 24/7. It’s all you do. You're on tour, you’re doing other Strictly-associated shows. You're not really 100% in the marriage, because this is gold. The trophy is handmade, by the way, and you're fixated on it.

“[During Strictly]. I didn't communicate with my friends, I didn't communicate with my family, I didn't communicate with my husband. It was just this one goal that I wanted to achieve so, so, so, so so much."

* The full interview with Oti and her husband Marius is on the latest podcast episode of We Need To Talk with Paul C. Brunson.

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