Princess Beatrice has made a heartbreaking confession amid the fall from the grace of her father, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.
The daughter of the exiled former prince, who gave birth to her daughter prematurely earlier this year, said she felt pressure to be “perfect”.
“I think so often, especially as mums, we spend our lives, you know, feeling we have to be perfect to do this,” Beatrice told the special edition of The Borne Podcast published on Monday. “And sometimes, when you are faced with that moment of learning that your baby’s going to come a bit early, it can be incredibly lonely.”
But with her father getting stripped of his royal titles following intense scrutiny over his relationship with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Princess Beatrice’s life is likely to get yet more lonely and imperfect. She and her sister Princess Eugenie are said to have temporarily left the country.
As a woman in the Royal Family who is expected to do everything from curtseying to handshaking flawlessly, she isn’t alone in such felt expectations. Kate Middleton has opened up about the “big pressure” she felt even to choose the right names for her first three children.
After her daughter, Athena Elizabeth Rose, was born on January 22, Beatrice joined forces with premature birth charity Borne to campaign for research. She said she believes it could be “life-changing” for parents.
Athena was due in early spring, but in December Beatrice was given a medical warning not to spend the holidays overseas due to the possibility of a premature birth.
Beatrice said it’s an “incredibly traumatic” experience for mothers, and added that she loves how the charity is present for them. One in 13 births in the UK is premature, and it’s the leading cause of deaths among babies in the first 28 days of life and lifelong disability. And yet pregnancy and childbirth receive less than 2% of medical research funding.
“I was really quite shocked to learn that we really do not have as much data with women’s health, with pregnant women’s health,” Beatrice told The Borne Podcast.
It has been a tumultuous year for Princess Beatrice. She was left “in tears every day” after last month’s news of her mother, Sarah Ferguson, having called Epstein a “supreme friend”.
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