Meghan Markle opens up about 'huge medical scare' after giving birth

Meghan Markle's new podcast has landed. The first episode of Confessions of a Female Founder features special guest Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of dating app Bumble. It includes loads of amazing insights into entrepreneurship, but also into Meghan's own life. At one point, the conversation turned to the two women's experiences of pregnancy, and the health complications they both had after giving birth.

"We both had very similar experiences — though we didn't know each other at the time — with postpartum, and we both had preeclampsia. Postpartum preeclampsia," Meghan told Whitney on the show. The Duchess of Sussex didn't reveal whether she suffered with the condition after she gave birth to Prince Archie, 5, or Princess Lilibet, 3, or both. Whitney, as for her, has welcomed two children, Bobby, who was born in 2019, and Henry, born in 2022.

Whitney has previously opened up about her difficult experience after giving birth to Bobby in a 2023 interview with TIME. "I got extremely sick five days postpartum with postpartum preeclampsia. Basically, my blood pressure was at stroke level, and it was undetected, so I was back in the hospital. And then the world shut down," she revealed.

"It was just a series of events that were tough to navigate. And so it just sent me into postpartum depression, but I didn’t realise I had it. Postpartum depression is this sneaky thing. It’s like: you know you’re not okay, but you don’t know that you’re not okay."

According to the NHS, preeclampsia can affect women in the second half of their pregnancy onwards. Early symptoms include high blood pressure and protein in the urine (both of which need to be picked up by a doctor), while further potential symptoms include severe headache, vision problems, pain below the ribs, vomiting, and sudden swelling.

Confessions of a Female Founder is Meghan's brand new podcast, produced by Lemonada Media. It follows the end of her recording contract with Spotify, which produced her previous podcast, Archetypes.

On the podcast, Meghan said of the preeclampsia: "It's so rare and so scary. And you're still trying to juggle all of these things, and the world doesn't know what's happening quietly. And in the quiet, you're still trying to show up for people — mostly for your children — but those things are huge medical scares."