LONDON – Prince Harry and his wife Meghan are expecting their second child, their spokesman said on Sunday, good news after a turbulent year in which they separated from the British royal family, started a new life in California and suffered a spontaneous abortion that Meghan said brought “an almost unbearable pain”.
“We can confirm that Archie will be an older brother,” said the spokesman in a statement, referring to the couple’s almost 2-year-old son, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor. Harry and Meghan, who are also known as Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are “very happy to be expecting their second child,” the newspaper said.
The statement did not say when the duchess should give birth or if the couple knew the sex of the baby. They launched a black-and-white artistic photo of them relaxing affectionately under a tree, a baby bulge clearly visible in Meghan.
For the 39-year-old American actress who became Duchess, the news is particularly welcome, given the anguish of her miscarriage last July, which she personally recalled in a column in The New York Times last November that drew a extraordinary worldwide reaction.
“After changing my diaper, I felt a strong cramp,” wrote Meghan about her son Archie, describing the morning of the abortion. “I threw myself on the floor with him in my arms, humming a lullaby to keep us calm, the joyful melody in sharp contrast to my feeling that something was not right.”
“I knew, when I grabbed my first child,” she wrote, “that I was losing my second child.”
Meghan put her sadness in the context of a painful year, in which the coronavirus pandemic took her loved ones away and the Black Lives Matter protests put the spotlight on police brutality.
She also described the taboo of talking openly about the loss of abortion, which she attributed to shame and said it led to “lonely grief”.
For Meghan, the news came days after a major legal victory in the battle she and Harry fought against British tabloids. On Thursday, a Supreme Court judge ruled that The Mail on Sunday’s editor violated Meghan’s privacy by printing a letter she wrote to her distant father, Thomas Markle.
The judge, Mark Warby, decided that Meghan had “a reasonable expectation that the letter would remain private”. The letter’s revelations in articles published by The Mail were “manifestly excessive and therefore illegal,” he wrote.