I don’t want to respond to these anons with their actual messages because I do not want to share stigmatizing messages. But to the anons who are downplaying the shame and stigma still associated with pregnancy loss, and reproductive issues overall for women and people: Kindly fuck off.
Pregnancy loss is deeply tied to racial and gender constructs. For centuries, reproduction was the only way women were seen as having value. Being unable to carry a pregnancy or even to have a son was tied to failure, to devaluation, even to death for women. British royal history itself bears this out.
These attitudes persist and are deeply socialized even if as a society we have seemingly moved past this level of overt misogyny. Women are still valued first and foremost for their reproduction and our lives controlled based on this function. State intervention in our reproduction, especially for Black and brown girls, is common, violent, and largely allowed.
In the US and around the world, pregnancy outcomes are hyper political and even criminalized. When you become pregnant, your worth as an individual is completely eradicated and all manner of interference and judgement is justified by society and the state on your person in the interest of protecting the potential life you carry. In the balance of society, women’s worth is always subjugated to everyone else’s. The ideal of perfect womenhood is one in which a women is focused entirely on her children and husband. Not an independent being with intrinsic worth and an interior life. And to be honest, much royal propaganda plays into this trope and uses it to judge other royal women.
Many women of color in the US face heightened scrutiny when they present with miscarriage in the US, with intrusive and cruel questions about what they “did wrong” from medical professionals and callous language that reveal deeply embedded racist attitudes.
Around the world, women are jailed for miscarriages. Many more are ostracized and met with suspicion. In countries with draconian abortion restrictions, it is even more fraught to lose a pregnancy and there are women right now sitting in jail in places like El Salvador for having miscarriages. Women in the US are also sitting in jails because of the outcomes of their pregnancies.
But even on a less extreme level, Western society still judges women when they are not mothers, or not mothers in the right way, or not mothers in whatever way society deems appropriate. Meghan is already a mother who has been judged constantly for how she interacts with her pregnant body. Doing something as natural as resting her hand on her stomach was deemed inappropriate or gauche, with reams of newspaper columns spewing bile against her. Deciding to not parade her just given birth body out of the hospital for the world to gawp at drove cycles of news abuse and public comment. Not “bouncing” back fast enough was mocked by many in this fandom. People have attacked Meghan’s devotion to her child time and time again.
For Black women, our maternity has always been commodified, first as slaves, then as caretakers. We are derided for having too many children. Judged for not having any children. And if we need assistance having children with fertility technology, we often face a medical system uninterested in helping us. Even the language used to describe our fertility and reproduction is steeped in white supremacist individualistic language that foregoes our humanity. “Products of conception” while normal medical terms when used in context with Black women harkens to a reality that our children are units of production in a white supremacist, capitalist society. And in our maternity, Black women face death because our autonomy, pain, and needs are often ignored, and because the generational impact of racism is imprinted on our genes making pregnancy riskier for us than our white peers.
So yes, even in the “enlightened” western world, pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes are deeply shamed and stigmatized. And for women like Meghan, sharing that pain is truly brave because Black women are not allowed to grieve our children, or control our bodies.
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