Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, has spoken honestly about the pain she and her husband, Prince Harry, felt after she suffered a miscarriage earlier this year in an opinion piece published in The New York Times on Wednesday.
The 39-year-old, who is married to Prince Harry, wrote about the heartbreaking experience in detail in a bid to raise awareness of the “taboo” subject, revealing she “felt a sharp cramp” while getting her son Archie ready one morning in July.
“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,” Meghan wrote in the frank piece titled ‘The Losses We Share’. “I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second.”
The Duchess then described how she and her husband of two years were both in tears as she lay in a hospital bed hours later. She did not reveal how far along in the pregnancy she had been.
“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.
“Sitting in a hospital bed, watching my husband’s heart break as he tried to hold the shattered pieces of mine, I realised that the only way to begin to heal is to first ask, ‘Are you okay?’.”
Meghan went on to say miscarriage is more common than you may think and needs to be talked about more openly.
“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.”
Buckingham Palace has since responded, saying the Duchess’ article about her miscarriage was “a deeply personal matter which we would not comment on,” the ABC reports.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex stepped down as senior members of the royal family earlier this year to start new life in the United States with their one-year-old son Archie, who was born in early May 2019.