Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Goes Into Labor - The New York Times

LONDON — Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, the wife of Prince Harry, has gone into labor for the birth of their first child, Buckingham Palace said on Monday. The child will be the first mixed-race baby in the British monarchy’s modern history.

As a direct descendant of Harry, the baby will be seventh in line to the throne. It is not clear whether the child will receive a royal title, like those bestowed on the three children of Prince William, Harry’s older brother, and his wife, Catherine.

Harry, 34, and Meghan, 37, announced in October that they were expecting. Details of the pregnancy, including the expected birth date and the baby’s gender, have been kept private.

“The duchess went into labor in the early hours of this morning,” Buckingham Palace said in a statement. Prince Harry was “by her side,” it said, adding “an announcement will be made soon.”

The couple have shaken up the royal family in a number of ways: Their wedding last May featured a gospel choir, a freestyling African-American pastor and a gaggle of Hollywood celebrities. They set aside convention after the wedding, opening their own Instagram account and offering little access to the royal-obsessed British news media.

In April, they announced they were canceling the traditional photo opportunity outside the Lindo Wing at St. Mary’s Hospital in the heart of London, curtailing the ritual hullabaloo that usually surrounds royal births. They said they would instead share photos of the newborn after they “had an opportunity to celebrate privately as a new family.”

For the legions of journalists waiting outside Windsor Castle, filling airtime has become an existential challenge.

In the absence of any actual information, journalists seized on random bits of evidence, such as the duchess’s mother employing the services of a dog walker or changes in Prince Harry’s plans to visit the Netherlands this week, as an indicator of when the baby might appear.

“I’m standing on a roof near the castle and not even in view of their home,” Keir Simmons, NBC’s chief international correspondent, said on Twitter.

What if the baby doesn’t come this week? a concerned reader wrote.

“Then I may throw myself from the castle walls,” he responded.

American networks, in particular, have seen the audience for royal news shoot up since Meghan, an American who was known as Meghan Markle when she worked as an actress, entered the scene.

Nick Bullen, who produces True Royalty TV, an on-demand cable service devoted to the royals, said that the audience in the United States ballooned when she joined the royal family, adding many women ages 20 to 40.

“It is coast to coast, and it is a much younger demographic than you might expect from royal watchers previously,” he said.

They are also more prosperous than typical British royal watchers, who, he said are in their 50s and 60s and hail from a “lower socioeconomic group.”

At a launch event for the channel in Los Angeles, he said, nearly every question from audience members was about the duchess.

“Actually, with these men and women in their 20s and 30s, even Diana to them is a little bit of history; she’s been gone so long,” he said, referring to Princess Diana, Harry’s late mother. “Their princess is Meghan, and that’s what they want to talk about.”

The surge in American interest has breathed new, and sometimes adversarial, life into the British conversation about the royal family, a discourse that traditionally alternates between affection and barbed criticism.

Meghan’s self-appointed defenders, who describe themselves as the “Sussex Squad,” have watched closely for negative commentary on social media and have mobilized against journalists and other critics.

“It’s like the ‘Arianators’ with Ariana Grande, or the ‘BeyHive’ with Beyoncé,” the reporter Omid Scobie told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” He added, “It’s a powerful force.”

Let's block ads! (Why?)