She is, therefore, a vacuum into which we can pour our every fear, hope, theory and trauma. Most people will never meet her, she lives behind a wall of security and royal protocol, she is forced by her position to be as distant, unknowable and neutral as any high profile diplomatic figure or head of state.
As an actress-turned-princess, Meghan Markle is, by definition, enigmatic. But even so, implicit bias must, argues Clarke, still be actively challenged with an anti-racist stance and training.
It has been intentionally underfunded for a decade by this government, creating a shortfall of 107,743 personnel in England, with 3,000 midwives leaving every year and health visitor services being either eliminated or privatised as a result. As Dr Ria Clarke told the Pregnant Then Screwed conference, while this is in part because black and Asian women are more likely to be affected by social and economic problems, "We need to talk about the fact black women may not feel that they will be taken seriously, which might make them less likely to disclose how they are feeling.” The National Health Service is one of the only, truly universal services in the UK used and staffed by a huge range of people. This becomes dangerous when, as we’ve seen in the recent UK Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths, the chances of death for black women in childbirth (1 in 2,500) is five times higher than that of white women. When similar rumours centred around Beyonce or Serena Williams it was, outright racism and loony online conspiracies-aside, perhaps the result of people simply not knowing what a pregnant woman of colour, the birth of a baby of colour, will look and be like. It is a silence, created by capitalism, convention and unconscious bias. In Britain we simply are not publicly familiar with what pregnancy, birth and newborns look like for women of colour. In every illustration in almost every single pregnancy and birth book, on every pregnancy test box, in all our tampon, nappy and breastpump adverts, on every online online advice column, at every NCT class and in every medical diagram, the woman and her baby we are exposed to is white. There are two parts to this strange phenomenon firstly, Meghan Markle is a woman of colour, secondly she is a member of the royal family. and 'Meghan Markle fake bump' is up 4400%. In fact, global searches for 'Meghan Markle fake pregnancy' are up 1650% in the last 90 days. In particularly dank and unpleasant corners of YouTube, Reddit and the like, anonymous strangers have built videos, threads and illustrated essays expanding on the crackpot theory that Meghan Markle is, in fact, not pregnant, but wearing a strap on rubber belly, has employed a surrogate, or is otherwise ‘faking’ it. So it was with a strange mix of horror, distaste, sympathy and fatigue that I learned of the ‘Meghan Moonbump’ theories circulating on the internet. I did three pregnancy tests, went for all the right scans and yet, until my tiny purple son pushed out into the bathing pool of an East London birth centre, there was still a part of me that wondered if I was having a baby at all. With a kind of uneasy thrill, I read about Queen Mary’s ‘phantom pregnancy’ of 1555 and wondered if I, too, had conjured this sickness, this thickening around the middle, this halt in my periods through hormonal changes, maternal longing and unchecked delusion alone. Being pregnant threw me into such deep whirlpools of anxiety that, more than once, I genuinely wondered if I was pregnant at all. We’d never know’.īefore getting pregnant I was in the extremely lucky position of having no long-term or ongoing illnesses: physical or mental. As we walked out of my 12-week scan, shaking and lightheaded, I turned to my partner and said ‘But, you know, that whole screen could just be a video the same video they show to everyone.
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