Britt Jones
A parenting influencer has been forced to apologise after a viral video of her children sparked fury.
Karissa Collins has responded to outcry after a video showing some of her 11 children circulated the internet as they appeared to be hitting her belly while she was suffering from a miscarriage.
Collins, who is 41, posted in a 17 July TikTok video that she apologises for the way some viewers took her video, but hit out at many more people in the process.
The mum, who lives in the US, posted a since-deleted video earlier this month which revealed that she and her husband, Mandrae Collins, were expecting their 12th baby.
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Sadly, she would go on to reveal days later that she had suffered a miscarriage and was going to allow the foetal tissue to pass naturally and without medical intervention.
That’s when Collins also uploaded a TikTok clip of some of her younger children hitting her stomach.
After many called her out for allowing her children to hit her stomach while in her condition, Collins spoke out about the whole thing.
“I apologize. When I posted that video, what was on other people’s minds was not on my mind at all,” Collins said in a video.
She explained that she was not viewing the moment the way others did online, stating: “I never thought of it that way. It was a cute moment with me and my children. I didn’t think anyone would even watch it.”
“I don’t do clickbait. I don’t like controversy,” Karissa went on to add.
She explained that she doesn’t ‘post offensive things for followers’, and all she is doing is ‘sharing the message that God has given me, and the ministry that I have, which is that you can trust God with your womb’.
She added: “We encourage women to trust God with how many children he wants to give.”
As for how the belly hitting video came about, the mum said they were comparing bellies when she decided to show hers to the kids.
Having been pregnant 15 times, she said she’s currently trying to ‘work off’ the weight, and she decided to post the video because it was a fun family moment where her children were laughing and squeezing her belly like it was ‘slime’.
Collins admitted: “I never wanted to forget that moment of them finding so much joy in my belly.”
However, she did go on to say her four-year-old daughter ended up hitting her belly ‘a little too hard’ and she can be seen saying ‘ow’ in the video.
But she stressed that the kids didn’t hurt her, nor were they ‘hurting anything inside of me.’
For those who criticised her big family, she also had some choice words.
The mum said: “If you haven’t had 11 children, I don’t feel like you have the right to say it’s impossible or that you can’t do it.
“I used to say that when I had five children. … I had no idea that God had planned a big family for us. We simply believe that we are to live lives of faith, and that children are eternal [and that] they have value. Lots of value.”
She added elsewhere in her video: “My platform is just to share the messages that the Lord gives me and to share the blessings that he has given us, and to show other women that it is possible to trust God and to be joyful and enjoy motherhood.”