Princess Beatrice opened up about her experience with premature birth for a moving essay in British Vogue earlier this month. The eldest daughter of Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew revealed how ‘little control’ she felt when she learned, through routine scans, that her second baby with husband Edo Mapelli Mozzi would be born early.
‘You have no idea how these things will play out, what happens next. The uncertainty leaves you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown,’ she wrote. ‘Like countless other expectant mums, I lay awake in the weeks leading up to birth, trying to monitor each movement of the baby in my tummy and asking myself a thousand times: “What if this happens, or what if that happens?”’
Athena Elizabeth Rose was born on 22 January, several weeks earlier than expected, weighing just four pounds and five ounces, her name a touching tribute to Queen Elizabeth II. In Princess Beatrice’s moving essay, she describes how Athena was ‘so tiny, it took more than a few weeks for the tears of relief to dry and for life with our healthy baby to feel real. Her feet were so small – almost the same size as the paws on one of my older daughter’s soft bunnies.’
She reminded her readers that although she has lived a somewhat extraordinary life, her ‘joys and fears in pregnancy and motherhood are the same as those experienced by millions of other women around the world’. She also reassured fans that Athena was now ‘doing really well’, as she explained that she has ‘a few more answers to what happened, but still no precise explanation’. It’s partly for this reason that she chose to become a patron of Borne, which led to her collaboration with Naylor-Leyland.