In, sigh, defense of Meghan Markle

Here we are again, Meghan’s latest cringe-inducing social media offering: an 80-second video of her twerking in a hospital delivery room while heavily pregnant with her daughter Lilibet. The clip, posted to mark her daughter’s fourth birthday, shows the Duchess of Sussex doing what can best be described as suggestive dance moves beside her hospital bed, complete with shimmies and rowing motions, while Haz joins in wearing a hoodie. It’s peak Meghan, really – simultaneously oversharing and attention-seeking while complaining about the invasion of privacy.

But rather than focusing on the obvious hypocrisy or questionable judgment of posting such intimate footage, internet conspiracy theorists have latched onto something far more sinister and frankly ridiculous: the notion that Meghan’s bump looks “fake” and that she must have been wearing a so-called “moonbump” – a prosthetic pregnancy belly used in the movies. 

And, look, I’ll be the first to admit that Meghan Markle gives us plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike her. The endless victimhood tropes, the Hollywood-meets-royalty performative activism, the way she and Harry have turned privacy complaints into an industry while simultaneously oversharing every intimate detail of their lives on Netflix and Instagram. Trust me, the woman provides enough material for criticism without having to resort to the absolutely barking mad conspiracy theory that she faked both of her pregnancies with prosthetic baby bumps.

Let’s dismantle this lunacy piece by piece, shall we?

First, the conspiracists claim that no woman nine months pregnant could possibly move the way Meghan does in the video. Clearly, these people have never witnessed the desperate lengths to which overdue pregnant women will go to encourage labor. Dancing, walking, spicy food, acupuncture – as Meghan herself noted in her caption, when you’re a week past your due date, you’ll try anything. The idea that pregnant women are somehow immobilized is Victorian-era nonsense. In the weeks around your due date, your OBGYN actually encourages lots of movement. Plenty of women dance, bounce on exercise balls or even have sex to move things along.

Second, they’ve seized upon the “lumpy” appearance of her bump and the fact that it doesn’t seem to move up and down as she dances. But as several sensible observers have pointed out, Meghan appears to be wearing a fetal monitoring belt around her stomach – standard equipment in delivery rooms that tracks the baby’s heartbeat and the mother’s contractions. These belts indeed make a bump look oddly shaped or constrained, but it doesn’t mean it’s fake. 

The monitoring equipment theory also explains why some conspiracy theorists noted she wasn’t wearing a hospital gown or had her jewelry removed. Many hospitals allow laboring women to wear their own clothes during early labor, and if she was between monitoring sessions or had stepped away to use the bathroom, the equipment might have been temporarily disconnected while still being worn. Also, she’s extremely rich. One imagines that the rules are simply more lax for the rich and famous. 

These conspiracies were born before Meghan’s first child, Archie, was – after royal watchers started claiming that Meghan’s bump was oddly shaped and would change size throughout her pregnancy. Then, after there was a delayed royal announcement when the child was born, and no “presentation” of him to the public, going against royal tradition, forums like Reddit exploded, with Meghan pregnancy truthers analyzing every aspect of her story. 

Then there’s the broader question of motive. What exactly would Meghan gain from faking not one but two pregnancies? The conspiracy theorists seem to suggest she did it for attention, but this makes no sense whatsoever. Meghan was already married to a prince and had achieved the ultimate fairytale ending. She hardly needed to fake pregnancies to secure her position or generate headlines – her mere existence seems to accomplish that quite effectively. 

Other conspiracy theorists, including Meghan’s sister and father, and even some so-called royal experts, claim that she hired surrogates to carry her kids and covered it up to ensure her children would still be in the line of succession to the throne, as the wording is clear that the “heirs must be born to a titled royal mother.” If Meghan was infertile, surely the more industrious thing to do is elevate her status as a women’s activist and write a book about her struggles. Or, she could have won the hearts of the country over by adopting. 

Moreover, the logistics of such a deception would be staggering. It would require the complicity of multiple doctors, nurses, hospital staff and presumably the entire royal medical team. Are we really to believe that the same woman who can’t keep her staff from leaking stories to the press managed to orchestrate a pregnancy hoax involving dozens of medical professionals, none of whom have ever come forward?

The moonbump conspiracy also ignores basic biology and medical reality. Pregnancy involves far more than just a growing belly – there are hormonal changes, physical symptoms, medical appointments, ultrasounds and countless other factors that would be impossible to fake convincingly over nine months. The idea that Meghan could have fooled not just the public but trained medical professionals is absurd.

Yes, Meghan Markle is fair game for criticism on many fronts. Her tendency toward self-aggrandizement, her apparent inability to maintain relationships with family members, her penchant for rewriting history to cast herself as the perpetual victim – these are all legitimate areas of concern. But her motherhood? Her pregnancies? Her children? These should be off-limits, not because she deserves special protection, but because basic human decency demands it.

The moonbump conspiracy represents the absolute worst of internet culture: the tendency to take legitimate criticism and push it into the realm of the genuinely unhinged. There are plenty of reasons to find Meghan Markle insufferable without resorting to bizarre theories about fake pregnancies. Let’s stick to criticizing her actual behavior rather than inventing elaborate fantasies about prosthetic baby bumps.

The truth about Meghan Markle is quite damning enough without having to make things up about the two unquestionable admirable things she has definitely done.