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Meghan Markle is planning a home birth and hoping to take a sizable chunk of time off work afterwards to focus on her new baby, according to reports.
“Meghan’s plan was to have a home birth with Archie, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans,” a source told Page Six this week. In the event, Meghan was over a week overdue, “and her doctors advised her to go to hospital,” but the source added, “She has a beautiful home in California, it’s a beautiful setting to give birth to her baby girl.”
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Archie’s birth was, in the event, trouble-free, meaning there is no reason for Meghan, 39, not to proceed with a home birth at their Montecito mansion.
After the birth, it would be highly credible to suppose that Harry and Meghan would want to take a lengthy break from their work and charitable commitments.
Days after Archie was born, Harry flew to the Netherlands to launch a sustainable travel initiative, while Meghan was editing an issue of British Vogue and designing a capsule collection for Smart Works.
The couple have been open about the struggle that Meghan faced with her mental health after Archie’s birth.
While she didn’t specifically label her experience as postpartum depression, Harry’s description of how “every single day I was coming back from work, from London, I was coming back to my wife crying while breastfeeding Archie,” will certainly have rung bells with families afflicted with it.
“They will both take some proper time off,” a friend told Vanity Fair this week. “It will be the summer and they want to make sure they both take their leave so they have some real quality time together once the baby arrives.”
Meghan and Harry’s spokesperson declined to comment on the claims to The Daily Beast—not, perhaps, a huge surprise given the great lengths the couple went to in order to protect their right to privacy at the time of Archie’s birth.
It does however seem very clear that the birth of their daughter will be a considerably less fraught affair than the birth of their son two years ago, which soured the couple’s already-strained relations with the media and some sections of the British public.
On the chaotic day of Archie’s birth, British journalists felt they had been hoodwinked when an announcement that Meghan had gone into labor was made several hours after she had actually given birth.There was already ill-feeling because the couple had refused to say where the baby would be born, preventing a ratings-friendly media circus from developing outside the hospital, like that which accompanied the birth of William and Kate’s children.
Although many would support Meghan’s reluctance to participate in a frankly medieval custom in which the palace offers a very public running commentary on the intensely private act of giving birth, the false crumbs of disinformation handed out reneged on an agreement with the media to provide such details accurately.
The irritation was compounded when the baby wasn’t revealed to the world’s cameras for several days, and the media complained they were being starved of information. The palace maintained admirable discipline when it came to the news blackout: the day after the birth, Queen Elizabeth was greeted by the former prime minister of Canada, Jean Chretien.
“Congratulations. Another great-grandchild!” he said.
The queen replied: “Yes, I know.”
He then asked: “How many of them have you got now?”
The queen replied: “Eight.”
It is a sign of the utter desperation of the media that these four words led newspaper front pages the next day.
It was fascinating to hear Meghan finally give her side of the story in her Oprah interview. She said that she was frustrated and fearful at the time at what she saw as the palace’s failure to protect her son, especially given her understanding that, as he wasn’t being given a title, he wouldn’t be entitled to automatic security.
She said: “I was very scared of having to offer up our baby, knowing that they weren’t going to be kept safe.”
One can scarcely imagine how daunting it must feel to bring a child into the world knowing it will have so little privacy.
Harry said in the interview: “I’m so proud of my wife. Like, she safely delivered Archie during a period of time which was so cruel and so mean.”
The birth of their second child, which is expected to happen in the early summer, or perhaps even late May, will of course be an entirely different experience for the couple, who can no longer have their lives invaded on the pretext that they should be regarded as public property.
One major issue that the couple will have to make a decision on is whether or not Harry will make a trip back to the U.K. for his grandfather’s 100th birthday on June 10, and for the official unveiling of a new statue of Diana on the 60th anniversary of her birth three weeks later.
The events represent an opportunity for the both sides of the war that has so bitterly divided the House of Windsor to demonstrate compassion—Harry and Meghan’s favorite concept, lest we forget—for the other. However, as the rollercoaster of the last few weeks has shown, the trajectory of this royal storyline is impossible to predict.
