Meghan Markle has spoken about experiencing a miscarriage in July, detailing how she was holding Archie when she realised something wasn’t right.
“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,” she wrote in a new article on the New York Times.
“I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second.”
The Duchess described laying in a hospital bed later, holding Prince Harry’s hand while being seen by medical staff.
“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,” she said.
Markle makes reference to the ITV interview in the piece, where she was asked: “Are you okay?”. “I answered him honestly,” she wrote, “not knowing that what I said would resonate with so many – new mums and older ones, and anyone who had, in their own way, been silently suffering.”
“Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few,” she added. “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 Duchess also wrote about how this year has “brought so many of us to our breaking points”, describing the devastation of Covid-19 and the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd that sparked the Black Lives Matter protests.
Useful websites and helplines:
- Sands works to support anyone affected by the death of a baby.
- Tommy’s fund research into miscarriage, stillbirth and premature birth, and provide pregnancy health information to parents.
- Saying Goodbye offers support for anyone who has suffered the loss of a baby during pregnancy, at birth or in infancy.