Meghan, Britain’s Duchess of Sussex, has revealed that she had a miscarriage, an extraordinarily personal disclosure coming from a high-profile British royal.
The wife of Prince Harry and former actress wrote about the experience in detail in an opinion article published in the New York Times on Wednesday, saying that it took place one July morning when she was caring for Archie, the couple’s son.
“I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second,” Meghan wrote, describing how she felt a sharp cramp after picking up Archie from his crib, and dropped to the floor with him in her arms, humming a lullaby to keep them both calm.
Meghan described how she and her husband were both in tears as she lay in a hospital bed hours later.
“Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few,” she wrote.
“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.”
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.
