Meghan Markle Calls For People To Share Their Pain After Silently Experiencing A Miscarriage

In a New York Times article, Meghan Markle wrote about the heartbreak and loss she experienced earlier this year when she had a miscarriage.

She wrote about the morning the miscarriage took place: she had just changed the diaper of Archie — her and Prince Harry’s firstborn — when she felt a sharp cramp and fell to the floor. “I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second”.

In the powerful piece, she expressed her decision to come out with her story was motivated by the fact that miscarriages were very common, yet no one seemed to talk about them, leaving the people who experienced the loss all alone in their grief. In Australia, 1 in 4 pregnancies end with miscarriage, yet it remains a silent trauma.

“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.”

I had 2 miscarriages and both are carved into my soul. It is like you join a secret club that you never knew about and there are no rules and no one talks to you. Thank you #MeghanMarkle for sharing your truth

— Diane Whittington (@dianewh66) November 25, 2020

Earlier this year. model Chrissy Teigen also shared the story of her miscarriage, describing the “the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the pain we’ve never felt before”.

Many people have been grateful at their display of vulnerability and honesty, as it is leading the way for normalising the issue and making it a topic people can talk openly about. Given black women experience miscarriages and other pregnancy loss at higher rates than their peers, Markle’s story is very important.

This piece from Meghan Markle isn't just about miscarriage & loss, but is a pretty remarkable call for empathy during a time when it seems lacking https://t.co/D64ftVzNxf

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) November 25, 2020

The article is also a call to arms, for people to display empathy in a time of extreme isolation and loss experienced by people around the world. Markle wrote about how this year has “brought so many of us to our breaking points. Loss and pain have plagued every one of us in 2020, in moments both fraught and debilitating”. From people who have lost someone to COVID-19, to Breonna Taylor and George Floyd’s families, she said that such loss coupled with increasing polarisation in the world is leading us to “feeling more alone than ever”. 

“We no longer agree on what is true. We aren’t just fighting over our opinions of facts; we are polarized over whether the fact is, in fact, a fact. We are at odds over whether science is real. We are at odds over whether an election has been won or lost. We are at odds over the value of compromise.”