Meghan Markle reveals she has suffered a miscarriage

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Meghan Markle today revealed she suffered a miscarriage over the summer in an article written for the New York Times.

The Duchess of Sussex has said she lost her second child after feeling a ‘sharp cramp’ while changing her son Archie’s nappy in July.

Writing in the New York Times today Ms Markle described falling ill at home in Los Angeles and being in hospital tearfully watching her husband Harry’s ‘heart break as he tried to hold the shattered pieces of mine’ as they grieved for their baby. 

Describing the tragic moment she realised ‘something was not right’, she said: ‘After changing his diaper, I felt a sharp cramp. I dropped to the floor with him in my arms, humming a lullaby to keep us both calm, the cheerful tune a stark contrast to my sense that something was not right’.

In the piece called ‘The Losses We Share’, she said: ‘I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second’.  It is not known how many weeks pregnant Meghan was, but most women suffer miscarriages in the first three months.

Meghan is the first royal to describe in detail the ‘unbearable grief’ of losing a baby. Zara Tindall has suffered two miscarriages while Sophie, Countess of Wessex, lost an unborn baby in 2001.

Ms Markle’s New York Times article also describes a year of ‘breaking points’ for the world, including the 1million-plus global Covid-19 deaths as well as the ‘social isolation’ of lockdown and the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the US. 

‘Polarization, coupled with the social isolation required to fight this pandemic, has left us feeling more alone than ever’, she wrote.

Today Meghan wrote that her miscarriage had happened on a July morning that ‘began as ordinarily as any other day’.

The Duchess of Sussex said she had woken up, fed the dogs, tidied up Archie’s clothes and crayons before ‘throwing my hair in a ponytail before getting my son from his crib’.

She then felt a pain in her stomach as she changed Archie’ nappy and then dropped to the floor holding him as she lost her unborn baby.

Ms Markle wrote: ‘Hours later, I lay in a hospital bed, holding my husband’s hand. I felt the clamminess of his palm and kissed his knuckles, wet from both our tears. 

‘Staring at the cold white walls, my eyes glazed over. I tried to imagine how we’d heal’.

Meghan says she has written the article about her own loss to encourage others to talk about it.

Justifying the timing of her article, she wrote: ‘This year has brought so many of us to our breaking points,’ Meghan writes. ‘So, this Thanksgiving, ‘let us commit to asking others, ‘Are you OK?’

She added: ‘Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few.

‘In the pain of our loss, my husband and I discovered that in a room of 100 women, 10 to 20 of them will have suffered from miscarriage. Yet despite the staggering commonality of this pain, the conversation remains taboo, riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning.’

Meghan wrote in the New York Times that after losing her child this year, she had thought about the royal visit she and Harry made in September 2019.    

She wrote: ‘I recalled a moment last year when Harry and I were finishing up a long tour in South Africa. I was exhausted. I was breastfeeding our infant son, and I was trying to keep a brave face in the very public eye.

‘Are you OK?’ a journalist asked me. I answered him honestly, not knowing that what I said would resonate with so many — new moms and older ones, and anyone who had, in their own way, been silently suffering. My off-the-cuff reply seemed to give people permission to speak their truth. But it wasn’t responding honestly that helped me most, it was the question itself.

‘Thank you for asking,’ I said. ‘Not many people have asked if I’m OK.’

The article she also describes the turmoil in 2020 caused by Covid and tensions caused by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the US saying 2020 was a year when ‘places where there was once community, there is now division’.

She wrote:  ‘A young woman named Breonna Taylor goes to sleep, just as she’s done every night before, but she doesn’t live to see the morning because a police raid turns horribly wrong. George Floyd leaves a convenience store, not realizing he will take his last breath under the weight of someone’s knee, and in his final moments, calls out for his mom. Peaceful protests become violent. Health rapidly shifts to sickness. In places where there was once community, there is now division.

‘On top of all of this, it seems we no longer agree on what is true. We aren’t just fighting over our opinions of facts; we are polarized over whether the fact is, in fact, a fact. We are at odds over whether science is real. We are at odds over whether an election has been won or lost. We are at odds over the value of compromise.

‘That polarization, coupled with the social isolation required to fight this pandemic, has left us feeling more alone than ever’. 

Meghan then describes being in New York in her ‘late teens’ and seeing ‘a woman on her phone in a flood of tears’. 

She wrote: ‘At the time, the city was new to me, and I asked the driver if we should stop to see if the woman needed help’. He told her not to worry. 

Pondering whether that happened she said: ‘Now, all these years later, in isolation and lockdown, grieving the loss of a child, the loss of my country’s shared belief in what’s true, I think of that woman in New York. What if no one stopped? What if no one saw her suffering? What if no one helped?’ I wish I could go back and ask my cabdriver to pull over’.  

In the final part of her piece the Duchess of Sussex warns of the ‘danger of siloed living’ and concerns that many ‘sad, scary or sacrosanct are all lived out alone’.

She then encourages people to stop people to ask: ‘Are you OK?’, adding that she believes that the ‘load of grief often becomes lighter’ when talked about.

‘In being invited to share our pain, together we take the first steps toward healing’, she wrote.

‘As much as we may disagree, as physically distanced as we may be, the truth is that we are more connected than ever because of all we have individually and collectively endured this year.

‘We are adjusting to a new normal where faces are concealed by masks, but it’s forcing us to look into one another’s eyes — sometimes filled with warmth, other times with tears. For the first time, in a long time, as human beings, we are really seeing one another’.

The article ends: ‘Are we OK? We will be’.  

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have openly shared their hopes of having two children to complete their family.

It was no secret they dreamed of welcoming a new addition – a baby brother or sister for Archie Mountbatten-Windsor.

Harry told activist and chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall in 2019 that he would only have two children ‘maximum’ for the sake of the planet. 

The intimate details shared in the article are strikingly at odds with the usual policy of senior members of the British royal family, who reveal almost nothing about their personal lives.

Harry’s grandmother the Queen has never discussed her private life in any media interview in her 68-year reign.

But Meghan and Harry stepped back from royal duties and moved to the United States earlier this year.  They have been trying to forge a new role for themselves outside the constraints of life in Britain’s strictly codified royal bubble.

Other royal women have experienced the loss of an unborn baby, with the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Tindall suffering two miscarriages before having her second child.

The Countess of Wessex lost her first baby in December 2001 when she was airlifted to hospital after suffering a potentially life-threatening ectopic pregnancy.

An estimated one in four pregnancies ends in a miscarriage according to the charity Tommy’s, which funds research into miscarriages, stillbirths and premature births, with most women losing their babies during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Have you suffered a miscarriage? Click here for support.  

 

 

 

 

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