Meghan Markle has revealed her experience with miscarriage on her new podcast. The Duchess of Sussex spoke to Indian American lawyer and politician Reshma Saujani, founder of the non-profit ‘Girls Who Code’, which strives to boost female presence in computer science, and ‘Mom’s First’. Meghan asked Reshma about her experience with miscarriage, which she had openly discussed before. Meghan also had a miscarriage, which she opened up about in 2020, Prince Harry also touched on the subject in his memoir ‘Spare’.
Speaking to her guest, Meghan said: “I have spoken about the miscarriage we experienced. And I think in some parallel way, when you have to learn to detach from the thing that you have so much promise and hope for and to be able to be OK at a certain point to let something go, something go that you plan to love for a long time.”
Reshma responded: “Yeah. I feel like you are reading my diaries as that’s really insightful as I don’t think anyone has said it that way for me but that’s right because here I was for so many years trying to get pregnant, having miscarriages because I had auto-immune issues and I got into this kind of scary habit where I would be in a doctor’s office and they’d be like, you have no heartbeat.”
Reshma added a heartbreaking comment: “And I should have just gone home and gone to sleep and curled up with my husband. But I would just take a breath and I would just show up in a living room, on a stage and just perform. And often times I was just performing to these children that I desperately wanted and I just got really good at that but it was eating me up inside.”
Meghan and Reshma also talk about bringing up children alongside work and the high expectations put on women including they “aren’t allowed to break” and “have to keep smiling”.
The explainer for episode two of ‘Confessions of a Female Founder’ also details how the Duchess of Sussex and the entrepreneur first met – while Meghan was still a working royal.
It reads: “Meghan met Reshma years ago when Girls Who Code was expanding into the UK. Here, they reunite to talk about redesigning workplaces for women and how to make the hard choice to put your health (and yourself) before your work.”
Girls Who Code is a nonprofit organisation aimed to support and increase the number of women in computer science. The organisation says it has helped train more than 670,000 girls, women and non-binary individuals in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
To promote the new episode, which was released on April 15, Meghan uploaded an Instagram story about the new content.
She wrote: “So excited for you all to hear this latest episode with Girls Who Code and Moms First founder @reshmasaujani! It was my pleasure to reconnect with her and dig into the real talk about building, balancing, and breaking through! (With babies, no less). How’s that for some alliteration? ;).”
Meghan’s first episode was released last week on the same day Prince Harry appeared at the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the latest stage in his legal challenge over the level of security he is given when he is in the UK.
In the opening episode, Meghan chatted to Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble. During the conversation, Meghan talked about her experiences of being a mum and revealed she suffered from a “huge medical scare” after giving birth.