Meghan Markle revealed in an article that she lost her second pregnancy in July. She wrote about it to stop the cycle of silence around pain.
Losing a child is never easy, no matter how it happens. Even if we didn't really get to meet our child. 10-20% of pregnancies end in pregnancy loss before the 20th week, which is what a miscarriage is, as per MayoClinic. It's heartbreaking every single time, for every single parent. The Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, has opened up about her own experience after getting pregnant for the second time.
Markle and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, are parents to one son, Archie, who was born in 2019. They tried to get pregnant a second time in 2020 but it ended up in a miscarriage during the summer, wrote Markle in the New York Times. The tragic incident took place in July and the couple had kept it private until now.
Writing in the New York Times, she said that she fell ill when she was at home in Los Angeles. "After changing his [Archie's] 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 the piece called The Losses We Share, she said, "I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second." She didn't mention how far along she was when the incident took place.
Hours later, when she was laying down in a hospital bed with Harry's hand in hers, she felt his sadness too. "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. 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," she wrote.
She was asked by a journalist if she was "okay" and she decided to be honest about it. Back then, she didn't know that her words would "resonate" with "new moms and older ones, and anyone who had, in their own way, been silently suffering." She realized that her healing began when she was asked if she was "okay" because not many asked her that.
"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?'" she wrote in the recent article.
She added that only after the "almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few" she discovered that in a "room of 100 women, 10 to 20 of them will have suffered from miscarriage." She hopes that people can talk about this pain. "Yet despite the staggering commonality of this pain, the conversation remains taboo, riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning," she shared.
She doesn't want this upcoming Thanksgiving to pass by without people being kinder to each other. "In being invited to share our pain, together we take the first steps toward healing," said the former actress.
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/opinion/meghan-markle-miscarriage.html
