Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, revealed she had a miscarriage over the summer.
The former actress shared the story of her lost pregnancy in a New York Times op-ed published on Wednesday. The day it happened, she wrote, started off like any other — with her caring for her and Prince Harry’s first child, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, when she then felt a “sharp cramp” and “dropped to the floor with” her son in her arms.
“I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second,” she 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.”
“Sitting in a hospital bed, watching my husband’s heart break as he tried to hold the shattered pieces of mine, I realized that the only way to begin to heal is to first ask, ‘Are you OK?'” Markle said.
She brought up the “taboo” nature of miscarriages and how they are “experienced by many but talked about by few.”
Markle noted that approximately 10% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, a statistic confirmed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
“Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few,” she said. “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.”
Markle connected the pain of losing her unborn child to the loss felt around the world this year as more than 1.4 million people have died from COVID-19, according to John Hopkins University’s coronavirus tracker. She concluded the piece by calling for people to ask others, “Are you OK?” during the holiday season, and provided an answer: “We will be.”
