LONDON — Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, are expecting their second child, their spokesperson said Sunday, a joyful bit of news after a turbulent year in which they broke away from the British royal family, started new lives in California and suffered a miscarriage that Meghan said brought “almost unbearable grief.”
“We can confirm that Archie is going to be a big brother,” the spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the couple’s nearly 2-year-old son, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor. Harry and Meghan, who are also known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are “overjoyed to be expecting their second child,” it said.
The statement did not say when the duchess was due to give birth or whether the couple knew the baby’s gender. They released an artful, black-and-white photo of them relaxing affectionately under a tree, a baby bump clearly visible on Meghan.
For the 39-year-old American actress-turned-duchess, the news is particularly welcome, given the anguish of her miscarriage last July, which she recalled in starkly personal terms in a column in The New York Times last November that drew an extraordinary worldwide reaction.
“After changing his diaper, I felt a sharp cramp,” Meghan wrote of her son Archie, describing the morning of the miscarriage. “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.”
“I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child,” she wrote, “that I was losing my second.”
Meghan put her sorrow in the context of a heartbreaking year, in which the coronavirus pandemic carried away loved ones and the Black Lives Matter protests put a spotlight on police brutality.
She also described the taboo of talking openly about the loss of miscarriage, which she attributed to shame and said led to “solitary mourning.”
For Meghan, the news came days after a major legal victory in the battle she and Harry have waged against Britain’s tabloid press. On Thursday, a High Court judge ruled that the publisher of The Mail on Sunday had violated Meghan’s privacy by printing a letter she wrote to her estranged father, Thomas Markle.
The judge, Mark Warby, ruled that Meghan had “a reasonable expectation that the letter would remain private.” The disclosures from the letter, in articles published by The Mail, were “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful,” he wrote.
